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Archive-name: soc-politics-intro.txt
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Last-modified: 2005/01/15 23:49:36
Version: 1.3
URL:
http://www.robomod.net/soc.politics/
soc.politics Posting Guidelines
Copyright 2003-2005, Brian Edmonds
$Revision: 1.3 $ $Date: 2005/01/15 23:49:36 $
The latest version of this document can be found at
*
http://www.robomod.net/soc.politics/
* post to the newsgroup or mailing list with the following text in
the subject (without the quotes): "send file: guidelines.txt"
Any inquiries, comments or suggestions should be sent to the group
moderation coordinator at
soc-politics-techmod@robomod.net.
_________________________________________________________________
Contents
* Introduction
* Charter
+ Miscellaneous Policies
+ Robomoderation
* How To Submit a Post
* The Mailing List
_________________________________________________________________
Introduction
The soc.politics newsgroup was created in the mists of history, and
was previously moderated by Charles McGrew. He disappeared from the
group sometime in the mid 1990s.
In March 2003 moderation of the group was passed to Brian Edmonds. The
team of Brian Edmonds and Graham Drabble are running the group and a
companion, gated mailing list with the assistance of Brian's
robomoderation software.
Since its creation a number of control messages have been sent which
at some sites appear to have erroneously changed the status of the
group to unmoderated. If this is the case at your site, you should
bring it to the attention of your news admin, as any postings you make
to a moderated group which is not properly recognized as such at your
site will be silently discarded at any site where the group is
correctly carried as moderated.
_________________________________________________________________
Charter
The group dates from before the time of formal charters, so the best
official description of the group is its original tagline: Political
problems, systems, solutions.
In practice the group appears to have been used for discussions of
political science, including posting and analysis of the campain
platforms put forward by political candidates. The group is not for
the posting of political ranting and railing, though impassioned (but
civil) debate is obviously to be expected.
Currently the group is open for unfettered posting, apart from the
conditions listed in the policies below. This means that there will be
occasional spam that slips through the filters. At some future point
when a community is well established, moderation may change to utilize
poster registration, whereby submissions from new posters are held for
manual approval and address whitelisting.
Miscellaneous Policies
The moderation software may (now or possibly in the future) enforce
the following policies:
* Postings must be in plain text. In particular no HTML or mixed
text and HTML posts will be allowed. Excessive quoting and large
sigs are strongly discouraged.
* Postings should be formatted within 80 characters in width
(limiting your lines to 72 characters is recommended), and also
should not exhibit the long/short/long/short/etc misformatting
that some posting agents can produce when misconfigured.
* No binary postings of any sort will be accepted. Exceptions will
be made for cryptographic signatures and such. S/MIME signatures
are usually far too bulky and will probably not be accepted.
* Crossposting is only allowed to one other group, and followups are
only allowed to two groups. If the poster does not set a followups
header it will default to soc.politics alone. Crossposts are not
allowed to another moderated group. Contact the moderator if you
feel you need to bypass any of these restrictions.
* Mail address blacklisting and whitelisting may be implemented as
deemed necessary. In addition a number of anti-spam filters are in
place, and will be expanded as needed.
All posts (with a working return address) will either be returned with
a rejection notice, or posted to the newsgroup and mailing list. One
exception is that rejection notices for the same error are suppressed
for a few minutes after the first one is sent to reduce the danger of
the robomoderator being used as a mailbombing agent.
Posting with a non-replyable address is strongly discouraged. If you
feel you must post with such an address, please make sure you are not
using one in a valid mail domain; appending .invalid to the address is
the recommended way to ensure this.
Robomoderation
The robomoderation software (robomod) enforces various anti-spam and
text formatting requirements. Note that in order to receive rejection
notices or other information from robomod it must have a valid email
address for you. More information on the registration process,
including how to use munged addreses, can be found at
*
http://www.robomod.net/register.html
* post to the newsgroup or mailing list with the following text in
the subject (without the quotes): "send file: register.txt"
The moderators may at their discretion register addresses for
auto-approval, or revert them to hand moderated status.
_________________________________________________________________
How To Submit a Post
At a correctly configured site you should simply be able to post to
soc.politics and everything will be managed for you behind the scenes.
If you find this does not work for you, you can submit directly to the
submission agent by mailing your posting to
soc-politics@robomod.net.
Please try the newsgroup first, and be sure to bring any problems to
the attention of your local news administrator so that they can be
dealt with.
_________________________________________________________________
The Mailing List
All postings to soc.politics are also distributed to the mailing list
soc-politics@robomod.net, which is available in both regular and
digest format. For subscription information, send email to
soc-politics-request@robomod.net or visit the list webpage at
http://www.robomod.net/mailman/listinfo/soc-politics.
Likewise, all postings to the mailing list are also distributed to the
newsgroup, so subscribers can use whichever of the newsgroup, list, or
digest formats is most comfortable.
_________________________________________________________________
Brian Edmonds
$Date: 2005/01/15 23:49:36 $
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