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From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: moderated "newsgroups" group
Message-ID: <3400@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 9 Jun 89 23:08:22 GMT
Reply-To: woods@ncar.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 61

[I am going to be at the USENIX conference next week, so I won't be able
 to reply to any articles or mailed comments until June 19]

This is, at this point, what I am leaning towards calling a vote on. It lists
the major issues and how the net SEEMS to be leaning.

1) Should we have a moderated group in which to post new group proposals,
   official calls for votes, and voting results? The consensus is very
   clear that such a group would be desireable.

2) Make news.groups moderated and create a new unmoderated group, or create
   a new moderated group and leave news.groups unmoderated? This is not as
   clear, but most of the comments I have seen favor leaving news.groups
   alone and creating a new, moderated group.

3) What to call the new group? news.groups.proposals and news.announce.groups
   seem to be the favored names. After reading all the comments, I tend
   to favor news.announce.groups, as news.announce is traditionally where
   these kinds of groups go. There is some merit to the idea that it should
   be a subgroup of news.groups, but more people seem to be suggesting
   news.announce.groups. I confess I hadn't thought of putting the group
   under news.announce; who says the discussion never accomplishes anything?!

4) Who should be the moderator? Other than myself, I haven't seen any formal
   suggestions for alternatives, and I have seen (to me) surprisingly little
   objection to the idea of me moderating the group. So, I propose that I
   be the moderator. Remember that if the net doesn't like the job I do,
   we can always go back to the old situation where everything gets posted
   in the (still unmoderated) news.groups. I plan to have a backup moderator
   who will take over when I am gone for more than a few days at a time.
   I don't know who that would be yet.

5) (The fun part) How much moderating should I do? I don't plan to reject
   proposals based on the merit of the proposal, but I see no harm in doing
   some rather obvious filtering, such as if someone suggests that we create
   a rec.football to discuss the NFL, I will point out that we already have
   a rec.sport.football for that purpose,  and save the poor soul from getting
   flamed to a crisp :-) If someone proposes something that has been shot down
   several times in the past (e.g. rec.music.rock) I might point that out and
   ask if they still want to try anyway. If they say yes, it gets posted,
   period. I would also ensure that the newsgroup creation guidelines are
   being followed (i.e. I won't post a call for votes 2 days after the
   proposal, I will ensure that they wait the required 2 weeks). Other than
   for violation of the guidelines or not within the group's charter (i.e.
   not a new group proposal, call for votes, or vote result), I will 
   *always* post an  article after one iteration, meaning that if I send
   a message back to the poster, and they respond that they still want to post
   it anyway, it gets posted. I will note this fact in an editorial remark
   at the beginning of the article, so everyone on the net will know what
   kinds of proposals are getting questioned. If the article is cross-posted
   to any other groups, including but not limited to news.groups, I will
   cross-post it to those groups when I send it out.

  I will read any discussion generated by this article when I return from
USENIX, and also any comments mailed to me. Then the required time will
have passed and I will post a formal call for votes on this proposal,
possibly modified as a result of comments I see. It will be very interesting
to see the results of the vote. I suspect we will see many more votes cast
than normal.

--greg