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From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: moderated "newsgroups" group
Message-ID: <3484@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 20 Jun 89 16:20:17 GMT
References: <3400@ncar.ucar.edu> <11945@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <1989Jun12.181910.10977@twwells.com>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 46

In article <1989Jun12.181910.10977@twwells.com> bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) writes:
>In article <11945@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> olsen@xn.ll.mit.edu (James J Olsen) writes:
>: I am quite uncomfortable with including 'violation of the guidelines'
>: as cause for permanently rejecting an article.
>
>I'm not too worried about this: since there would also be an
>unmoderated group, should Greg's judgement prove faulty, the injured
>party would still have a forum.

  This is more-or-less what I had in mind. In particular, I do *not* want
the responsibility for determining when "extraordinary circumstances" are
present. That term is vague on purpose; by definition it is impossible to
determine what extraordinary circumstances are until they actually occur.
If someone thinks that such circumstances are present, then they are free
to post in news.groups and say so. The guidelines can be violated if the will
of the net dictates that they should be; just not via news.announce.groups.
I envision that group as the place where "normal" group creation proposals
will be processed; "extraordinary circumstances", again by definition,
will require special handling.
   The bottom line is, anything rejected for news.announce.groups can always
be posted to news.groups. In fact, if that is done and it becomes clear to
me that an announcement of what is going on SHOULD appear in 
news.announce.groups, I may post one.
  Secondly, I intend to enforce the intent of the guidelines, not the letter.
I'm not going to reject a call for votes just because it came 31 days after
the call for discussion when the guidelines call for 30 days max. However,
if the call for votes comes 60 days later, I might, unless the discussion
is still going on. The point of that rule is that when votes are taken,
the issues should still be fresh in people's minds. If we have an issue
that is really discussed continuously for that long, then I don't see any
reason why a call for votes can't appear very late. On the other hand, if
discussion dies down, and a month later a call for votes appears out of the
blue, this is what the 30-day max rule is designed to prevent. In other words,
if the guidelines are followed to the letter then things will always get posted.
If not, then some personal judgment on my part will have to be applied to 
decide if the *intent* of the guidelines is being followed.
  Lastly, I would like it if people would stop referring to the guidelines
as "mine". They aren't. I maintain the wording in them, but I didn't really
write them. The rules set down there evolved over several years and dozens
of flame wars encompassing the entire net. I will always entertain suggestions
for changing them. In fact, I would even be willing to post such suggestions
in news.announce.groups (with discussion happening in news.groups, of course)
if they are reasonably well stated suggestions and as long as the moderated
group doesn't get overwhelmed with this sort of thing.

--Greg