Xref: utzoo news.groups:10280 news.admin:6037
Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mailrus!ncar!woods
From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: moderated "newsgroups" group
Message-ID: <3494@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 21 Jun 89 13:55:26 GMT
References: <3400@ncar.ucar.edu> <11945@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <1989Jun12.181910.10977@twwells.com> <3484@ncar.ucar.edu> <1441@xn.LL.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 27

In article <1441@xn.LL.MIT.EDU> olsen@xn.ll.mit.edu (Jim Olsen) writes:
>It is far preferable for the moderator to simply ensure that the
>only things appearing in the newsgroup group are in fact newsgroup
>proposals, and let the voters decide whether the guidelines have been
>followed sufficiently for that case.

  If this is what everyone wants, I'll go for it, but the problem with this
is that everyone thinks their own pet newsgroup proposal is special. If one
person is allowed to violate the guidelines, then everyone will want to.
In that event, there is little point in having the guidelines at all.

>The guidelines *are* Greg's.  He wrote the guidelines in their current
>form, after a discussion which failed to achieve consensus.  

  Oh? On what issue was there no consensus? Remember that "consensus" does not
mean "everyone is in 100% agreement", it just means that a large majority of
the participants agree on all the main points. As I recall, the only issue
on which there was no consensus was whether or not to change the 100 vote
rule, and even the decision to leave it alone was relatively uncontroversial.
As it happens, moderating news.whateveritscalled doesn't have anything to do
with enforcing this particular rule anyway. So, what is it in the guidelines
that I would be enforcing that there was no consensus on?
  The guidelines are NOT mine. Even had I crafted them all on my own from
scratch, which I obviously did not, they would be ineffective unless there
were a netwide consensus that what is in them is mostly "good things".

--Greg