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From: gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Moderation in Some Things
Message-ID: <2792@amdahl.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 16-Feb-86 17:19:57 EST
Article-I.D.: amdahl.2792
Posted: Sun Feb 16 17:19:57 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Feb-86 03:22:27 EST
References: <7031@ki4pv.UUCP>
Reply-To: gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett)
Organization: Amdahl Corp, UTS Products Group
Lines: 33
Summary: I don't think replacing net.news.group with a mod group is a good idea

I am opposed to net.news.group being replaced by mod.news.group.  I see
the problem that you are talking about, but my objections are two:
[1] It ain't that bad [2] I encourage instead the allegedily hopeless
task of user training.

Net.news.group isn't taking up a lot of disk space, and is in fact
rather moderate, so its abuse in that sense is rather
minor.  I, too, am bothered by the followup message (which often
include the entire original article, of course) consisting of simply
"me too" or whatever from the poster.  But this has been relatively
rare.  When this does happen, send a (polite!) note to the poster that
this sort of thing is discouraged.

And besides having polls on creating/removing newsgroups, we also need
a public forum to discuss the purpose of existing newsgroups from time
to time (should headhunters post to net.jobs?  What should we do about
net.sources? etc).  These postings are not wasteful but encourage
common understanding and (hopefully) consensus on what do about certain
newsgroup issues.

I am have just finished taking a poll via Usenet on another matter.
While a few have posted their votes, most have not.  More importantly,
almost all the votes that were posted also contained reasonable and
informative arguments pro/con, and this is quite valuable to the
undecided voters to help make their opinions.

(Notice that this is a vote, and is being posted to net.news.group.
It was originally going to be mailed to ki4pv!tanner but I felt
it made sufficient number of important points that I decided to
post it instead, because the arguments I provide here may help
people decide for themselves how to vote in this matter).
-- 
Gordon A. Moffett		...!{ihnp4,seismo,hplabs}!amdahl!gam