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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: net.news.group,net.news.stargate
Subject: What makes Stargate moderation work better?
Message-ID: <917@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Fri, 25-Jul-86 11:26:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.917
Posted: Fri Jul 25 11:26:27 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 25-Jul-86 21:34:08 EDT
References: <260@dmsd.UUCP> <6945@utzoo.UUCP>, <262@dmsd.UUCP> <6970@utzoo.UUCP>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
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Xref: mnetor net.news.group:3272 net.news.stargate:208

In article <6970@utzoo.UUCP>, henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>                                    ...on a moderated channel like Stargate,
> we won't have to do it over again two years later when our 9600-baud modems
> are saturated and we need to upgrade to 19.2.

Gee, that doesn't take a Stargate or a Starhub or anything.
Just remove "net,world,comp,..." from your sys file and leave in "mod".
Boy that was simple and it doesn't even need next year's technology!

Oh, I see...stargate will somehow moderate things that the current 
Usenet would not?  With paid staff or what?  We seem to have all the
volunteer moderators busy already; at least I don't see anybody
screaming for the job of mod.unix-wizards or mod.lang.c moderator.
(Let alone the flame groups.)

These days I am not so sure that moderation (editorial functions) would
reduce the traffic significantly.  Use a big figure and say that 50%
of the current traffic is trash that an editor would weed out.  Now we're
back to last year's traffic level.  We've bought ourselves a year.  Why won't
the traffic grow back to today's level again as more machines and users
and gateways and interesting topics join the net?  Or are the moderators
going to disallow new topics, new gateways, new users?

I think Usenet traffic is like files on disk:  it grows to fill all the
available space and then you have to prune periodically.  But there's
no way that today's actions will keep it from filling up next month or next
year.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
		     May the Source be with you!