Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!pprg.unm.edu!hc!lll-winken!uunet!attcan!lsuc!ncrcan!ziebmef!cks
From: cks@ziebmef.uucp (Chris Siebenmann)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Restricting posting privileges
Message-ID: <1989Mar18.225511.16763@ziebmef.uucp>
Date: 19 Mar 89 03:55:09 GMT
References: <21422@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: cks@ziebmef.UUCP (Chris Siebenmann)
Organization: Ziebmef Public Access Unix, Toronto, Ontario
Lines: 63

In article <21422@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> nj@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Narciso Jaramillo) writes:
| If the S/N ratio is becoming unacceptably low, then _all_
| sysadmins--whether of university, professional, or public-access
| sites--should consider restricting new users to read-only access for
| some reasonable period of time.

 I think this is a good idea in general; new users to the net can make
really bad mistakes. What I prefer instead of outright read-only
access is requiring postings from new users to be approved before they
are really posted.

 In fact, this is what I do here on the Ziebmef. People in a certain
group have their postings mailed to news-poster; someone then reads
them and either approves and posts them or returns them to the author
along with commentary as to what's wrong (occasionally I correct minor
mistakes like missing lines between the header and the body before
posting, but I never make changes to the posting; it is always a
binary yes/no decision). Once users have made a few postings and shown
me they know what they're doing I move them out of the
require-approval group and they can post without restrictions. 

 Best yet, this took very little work to add to Cnews, and it was all
done in shell scripts. I'd be glad to mail details or actual code to
people who are interested.

| However, I don't agree that the S/N ratio among undergraduates is
| much worse than the S/N ratio among other posters.

 I agree. In my experience, the S/N ratio for undergraduate users here
is no better and no worse than the S/N ratio for other sorts of users.
I would welcome information from other people about this as well.

| I think the controversy will eventually boil down to whether people
| feel USENET should be a large, open forum, or a more restricted,
| "professional" network.  

 How does one define "professional"? Nominally, most every newsgroup
on this network is "professional" insofar as it has been created by
the votes of professionals.

| The latter opinion would lead to such
| questions as whether large commercial sites (e.g. Portal) and large
| BBS networks (e.g. FidoNet) should be denied USENET feeds, in view of
| the large number of young and nonprofessional posters from those
| sites.

 This battle is lost before it's started; there is no way to close
such people out of Usenet. Anyone can give a feed to anyone they like,
and there's very little other sites can do about it. And given the
existence of uunet, someone who wants a feed and is willing to pay for
it can have one.

 However, I agree that site should bear some responsability for what
its users post, and that a gateway should bear some responsability for
the traffic the systems on the other side generate. One of the
problems I think people had with Portal is that they didn't seem to
feel any responsability for what their users did.

-- 
	"Though you may disappear, you're not forgotten here
	 And I will say to you, I will do what I can do"
Chris Siebenmann		uunet!{utgpu!moore,attcan!telly}!ziebmef!cks
cks@ziebmef.UUCP	     or	.....!utgpu!{,ontmoh!,ncrcan!brambo!}cks