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From: mesard@bbn.com (Wayne Mesard)
Newsgroups: alt.sys.sun,news.groups,news.software.b
Subject: Moderation in moderation (was Re: comp.sys.sun performance)
Message-ID: <52020@bbn.COM>
Date: 9 Feb 90 18:56:31 GMT
References: <15966@well.UUCP> <4579@brazos.Rice.edu> <GCRUM.90Feb7151901@aludra.usc.edu>
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Reply-To: mesard@labs-n.bbn.com (Wayne Mesard)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
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gcrum@aludra.usc.edu (Gary Crum) writes:
>Here's my proposal: Make comp.sys.sun unmoderated, and if there is a
>volunteer to do filtering, have a moderated group also.  The content
>of the moderated group could be the "best of" the unmoderated group.

Reposting best-of articles from another group is a serious waste of
bandwidth.  Over in alt.sources, we solved this problem with
alt.sources.index.  The moderator periodically posts articles containing
the message-ids and subjects of each alt.sources article worth reading.

I don't know if anyone's written a program to parse these articles and
adjust a user's .newsrc file accordingly, but a simple shell script
should do the trick.

Everyone's happy: no delays associated with moderation, no censorship
[sic], minimal bandwidth increase and those who want moderation still
have it.

Of course, the _right_ solution would be to allow post-hoc crossposting
of articles.  I.e., I send a control message out which will link an
article into a newsgroup that the original poster didn't include in the
Newsgroups line.  [There are other reasons why this would be a cool
thing to do, and IMHO future versions of the news software should
support it.]

Wayne();