Re: A garbage free logic forum?

Peter_Smith <ps218@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've mused about this in the past, and the recent spews of garbage
here have made me think of it again.
There is, it seems, a place for (a need for??) something on the net
between the garbage-ridden sci.logic and (say) the FOM (Foundations of
Mathematics) mailing list. E.g. a moderated forum, with a large enough
group of moderators not to need too much work from any one person to
keep it on track and free of cranks and buffoons.
If there is interest, I might look into the practicalities of setting
one up: but what do others think?

(I was the person who originally proposed sci.logic and ran the vote
for it, all those years ago).

I can see where you're coming from - it does feel like we're under
siege - but there are two problems I can't see a way round:

- there is *already* a vast amount of very good content in the group
archives (most of Torkel Franzen's and Herb Enderton's posts, for
example). How would pulling up the drawbridge to create a restricted
forum help anybody who wanted to find that?

- who's going to do the moderating? Manning those watchtowers and
stoking the fires under the cauldrons of boiling oil is a lot of
work. There's always a supply of megalomaniac fools and they'll
always have ways of making life difficult for a moderator.

Some kind of whitelisted filter of the group might work, at least
to create a read-only version of it. Anyone could do this: simply
filter the archive through something that would only accept postings
by persons proven to be sensible in the opinion of the filter
maintainer. The attractive thing about that solution is that it's
essentially democratic - you could set up one set of filters and
the nutters could set up their own. We could then take our pick as
to whose view of the group we'd rather read. Yours would probably
be one of the more popular ones.

============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975
stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557
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