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Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!uwvax!oddjob!hao!woods
From: woods@hao.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,news.admin
Subject: Re: Getting serious about moderation
Message-ID: <725@hao.UCAR.EDU>
Date: Sun, 14-Jun-87 00:27:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: hao.725
Posted: Sun Jun 14 00:27:51 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 14-Jun-87 18:42:31 EDT
References: <687@desint.UUCP>
Reply-To: woods@hao.UUCP (Greg Woods)
Distribution: world
Organization: High Altitude Obs./NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 55
Xref: utgpu comp.sources.d:773 news.admin:466
Summary: comp.sources.misc WILL GO UNMODERATED, so you can stop flaming now

In article <687@desint.UUCP> geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) writes:
>in general I like the moderation system and don't want it
>to break down because of an irresponsible few.

  Neither do we, and thanks for coming up with a suggestion. However....

>I'd like to suggest a new, password-based form of moderation approval.

  A nice idea, really, but in practice this will be very difficult to
implement and can also probably be gotten around (albeit with a bit
more difficulty than the current method).

>is to make the "Approved: " line into a message-ID-based password which
>would be compared with a list of legal moderators from a /usr/lib/news file.

  This is the bad part of your idea. The reason that it is bad is that it
requires system administrators at EVERY NET SITE to keep that list of
moderators up to date. In the past, they did not do so, which is why we
decided to change the way moderated groups work in 2.11 (in 2.11, moderated
group postings are mailed to the nearest backbone site!name-of-group (with
dots changed to dashes to keep sendmail happy). Then, only the backbone
sites need to keep their moderators list up to date. It might be possible
to implement the checking only at the backbone sites, but this then requires
the backbone sites to run a slightly different version of the news software
than everyone else does. I think that might cause more problems than it solves.

  It is becoming increasingly clear that the only solution to this problem,
which only seems to be occurring in one group, is to make comp.sources.misc
unmoderated again. This will happen soon, so you can all put your flames
away now. Speaking of flames, I'd like to point out that people out there
who insult us and flame us in public make it MUCH harder to admit when 
a mistake has been made than it would otherwise be. Please think about
that the next time you disagree with a decision made by the backbone.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't express your disagreement, but at
least try to do it in a civilized manner, and stop accusing us of being
"dictators", "power-hungry" or of creating/deleting groups based on our own
personal preferences. None of us get paid for any of the work we
do to support USENET except by our employers, who are in turn generous
enough to donate money, disk space, peripheral devices, CPU cycles and some of 
our time to the effort. Since they pay us, it is THEIR interests that we 
primarily look out for. We also do things that we feel will benefit the net as 
a whole.  Sometimes we are wrong. It appears that trying to keep non-source 
postings out of the source group by moderating it was one of those times.
   If comp.sources.misc does indeed go unmoderated, which now appears almost
certain after our meeting at USENIX this last week, then we will simply have
to put up with non-source postings there. Other than moderation, there isn't
any way to keep them out, and even that has failed, so I suggest that if you 
MUST flame someone who does put non-source postings there, do it by mail,
because your flame is in turn another non-source posting.

--Greg
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