Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!swap!page
From: page@swap.Sun.COM (Bob Page)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Need new moderator for comp.{sources,binaries}.amiga
Message-ID: <128801@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 5 Dec 89 18:38:33 GMT
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: page@Eng.sun.com (Bob Page)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 170

This posting is rather long, but I hope there's a lot of signal.

A number of folks have sent me mail expressing their interest, and
asking what it takes to be moderator.  First, interest should be
expressed to the net; I don't think I should be picking the new
moderator, I think the readers of comp.sys.amiga shoud decide.  If the
readers of c.s.a want me to decide, we can probably have the whole
matter taken care of in a few days, as I've already gotten some very
good people (in my opinion) asking to moderate.

Second, here's some answers to questions.

> How do you get stuff?

People email it to me.  Sometimes they post it to the binaries or
sources group like a regular posting.  In that case, some software on
their system knows it's a moderated group, and emails the article to
some site that knows who the moderator is.  That site emails the article
to me.  So either way, it ends up in my mailbox.

Since I also have Internet access, some folks send me mail with a
pointer to the code, and I FTP from their machine.  This is not common,
however.  At ULowell, I had a directory where people could FTP files to
me for posting, but Sun doesn't allow anonymous FTP, so I don't do
that here.

> Do you test the postings?

Usually not.  Mostly because I don't have the time.

> How much volume?

It comes and goes.  Figure on the average, about 200KB a week.  However,
the more often I post, the more people are encouraged (or reminded
maybe) to send me stuff, so when I'm posting, I'm usually getting a lot
of submissions.  If I don't post anything for a few weeks (a practice
I do not recommend, by the way), things come in slowly.  Since I
don't post a lot, I'd say 200KB/week.  If you post stuff as it comes
in, it might be as high as 500KB/week.

> How much time does it take to do the job justice?

I'd figure on 10 minutes per individual posting you end up sending.  For
multi-part postings, maybe 5 minutes per, so a 6-part posting to the
binaries groups takes maybe half an hour to prepare and post.  I do
everything on my UNIX machine so I can get it done faster (sometimes the
Amiga is faster but there's upload/download time involved too).  If I
tested the code, it would naturally take a lot longer.

Some take a LOT of time, some take almost no time.  I can count on
submissions from Matt Dillon to take a while, as the binaries and
sources need to be parsed out of his tree into different areas, docs and
config files need to be indentified and duplicated, and sometimes
binary-only run-time code needs to be uuencoded for the sources group,
otherwise the source code isn't complete, and I'll get flamed.  On the
other hand, I know anything from Kim DeVaughn can go out very quickly,
since he sends me things in split, uuencode zoo files, usually separated
into sources and binaries.

You can cut down on the amount of time you spend fiddling with code by
requiring rigidly formatted submissions, but I suggest against it.  I
accept things in just about any format - compressed tar files, split
uuencoded lharc files, etc.  You name it, people will send it.  I figure
that way is best, because if people have to conform to rigid posting
rules, they won't submit.  I can easily see Matt, for example, saying
'take it or leave it, I'm too busy to format it for you' .. and I
wouldn't blame him for it.

> How much disk space do you have to devote to the job?

Once the posting comes in, it goes into a holding area until I can get
to it.  When I go to post it, I copy it from the holding area into the
posting work area, and also to a 'saved' area, just in case I get
reports of problems later on.  I nominally save the 'saved' stuff (the
original postings as they come into me) for about a month.

Once the posting is reformatted to "Usenet-standard" and goes out to the
world, I put the files in an archive.  I was fortunate that while I was
at ULowell I ran the machines, so I could devote as much disk space to
the archive as I wanted.  At Sun, Raz was kind enough to give up 70MB of
his workstation's disk for the kilowatt archive, so I could keep stuff
there.

While you don't HAVE to have an archive, there are two reasons why you
should.  The first is that when you post something, you give it an
archive name, for all those sites around the world (and there are quite
a few of them!) that automatically archive the sources.  If you don't
have an archive yourself, you'll save disk space, but you won't know
what names you've already used, so you might give something the same
name you've already used, which is going to mess up the archive, if not
the archivers.  The second reason is that folks will often ask you to
send them posting foo.uu4 or something, which you posted a month ago, or
yesterday, but for some reason never made it to their site.  [This
manual intervention stuff goes with the territory, I'm afraid.  At Sun
Raz set up en email archive server so I could direct folks to use that
rather then spend my time sending people stuff from the archive]

The archive is currently about 40M-50MB.  An exact figure is hard to
give since kilowatt's archive is in a sad state.  Raz has since moved,
so he's not on kilowatt any more.  My (and now Raz's) network connection
to it hasn't been good enough lately to get things as good as they
should be.  Hopefully soon I can put everything on tape and send it
off to those folks who want it.

Technically, you can get by without having to use up much disk space.
The method I took probably maximized the amount of disk space needed.
Over time, however, I'm glad I used the approach I did.

> Do I have to post from a UNIX system?

No.  You do need the posting tools, however.  The most rudimentary are
the preparation tools, like zoo, uuencode, shar and split.  I have some
special tools to look for viruses in binaries, binaries in source
postings, etc, but there's just stock C that you can port anywhere.

There is one tool, the actual posting program, that does a lot of things
on your behalf, like increment the issue number, keep a log of postings,
make sure you get the headers right, etc.  It was originally written for
UNIX by Rich Salz, moderator of comp.sources.unix.  I've modified it a
great deal, and it still runs only under UNIX, but I've used it on a
VAX, sun3 and sun4 without any problems.  Once you see what it does, you
might be able to port it to your machine, or convert it to AREXX
scripts, or whatever.

The one tool I don't have but should is something that looks for
copyright notices and shows them to me.  At the moment I have to do it
myself.  You'd be suprised at the number of people who put copyright
notices in their code and docs and never permit redistribution.  A quick
note to them usually clears things up.

> How much do you reject?

I accept almost everything except for:
	1. Demos of commercial software
	2. Products of software, like animations, sound files, pictures.
	   Once in a while I make an exception for stuff that's bundled
	   with something else; e.g. a sound file with 'muncho'.

I also temporarily reject Copyrighted material with no redistribution
statement, and stuff I can't unpack (people invent the weirdest ways to
send stuff.  If comp.binaries.amiga was unmoderated, there would be
more people wailing about how they need some unarchiver than people
posting code).  Usually a note to the submitter about the problem
will clear things up.

I don't like posting shareware either, but I post it.

> How do you decide what gets posted when?

Usually First in, first out.  Once in a while I give priority to some
code that's relevent to a hot topic in one of the discussion groups.
However, I don't do that any more because I haven't had time to read
Usenet since July.

> Bitnet OK?  Or is it pretty much a internet/usenet specific function???

It's pretty much a USENET (not even internet) specific function, only
because USENET was never designed to ship large programs around.  I
think the moderator needs to continually keep that in mind, else we'd
start seeing 400K postings, which would never work in the Usenet world.
[We're talking least common denominator here, unfortunately].  BITNET
has the distinctly bad reputation for 80-character records, and munging
the ASCII character set.  It's doable from anywhere, but I think a
Usenet site would be best.

> Will I be famous?

Yup.  Not as famous as Fred Fish, though.	:-)

..bob