-- Green Eggs and Spam

On Fri, 11 Jan 2008, quasi wrote:
<marsh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The procedure for this modest effort is described at

http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=policies:creation

Many here will back you in your efforts.

There are many arguments against creating a moderated group.

Censorship has the potential to be unfairly applied.

It's not censorship to tell the uncouth to shut up.
It's not censorship to prevent the rowdy from pissing in public.

Lots of arguments would ensue in that regard.

Why? Moderated newsgroups are an established practice.

Moderation is hard, time consuming work.

The moderation can be light requiring no more effort that what I do
already deleting the non-math suff. So why do we each individually
have to do it when we could take turns?

For a group with a high volume such as sci.math, it needs a lot of
volunteer moderators, and a lot of coordination between them.

Sci.math.mod will not have high volume at first and when it's found out
that it's moderated, the excessive posts seen at sci.math will not be
recurring.

With just a few moderators, a high volume group will often stall.

You are over estimating the job specifications.
It's not expected that any post be read to assure
mathematical acumen. Just that it not gibberish.

On the other hand, with more than a few moderators,
disagreements among them become more likely.

If moderation were heavy that could be possible.
Yes, you may expect some variance between moderators.
Why is that a mountain and not a molehill?

The idea of a moderated group may sound nice in principle, but in
actual practice, it's not worth the trouble -- there are too many
thorny issues. The link below discusses some of these issues.

<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/mod-pitfalls.html>

Interesting read. What a bother, the bureaucracy of the web. For a
lightly moderated newsgroup, could there not be a fall back position of
temperately not being moderated? For example one moderator takes ill and
the other two can't fill in until their turn. Then the moderator should
be able to set his moderation to everything automatically goes through.

It's also very encouraging since he's moderating multiple newsgroups and
we're looking to moderate only one.

On the other hand, if nothing else works, and if the spam increases
beyond the point of general acceptability, we may be forced to make a
moderated group, but n my opinion, it's an option of last resort.

It's possible that not only will we have to do that, but also that we will
have to pay a premium to buy anything that is not saturated with visual
and audio ads.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Request for Discussion
    ... will undertake the moderation. ... That anyone can contribute without fear of censorship is valuable. ... customized interface to the generic pool. ... censorship to save his own filtration time by reusing yours. ...
    (sci.physics)
  • Re: No prefix, no moderation. Was. Re: (RCSD) (RCSD) prefix - was: More stamp chat?
    ... I see no need for the RCSD prefix anymore because I see practically no ... years of freedom (even if moderation is not censorship but in our case ... excepting for governments? ...
    (rec.collecting.stamps.discuss)
  • Re: Who goes to "Temple" ?
    ... > Jackie wrote: ... >> I think there is a difference between censorship and moderation. ... >> to escape from the anti-semitism so prevalent in the cesspool that SCJ ...
    (soc.culture.jewish.moderated)
  • Re: Moderated group voting procedure
    ... Even if that new newsgroup is blatantly going to be run by a clique ... because you have the "wrong" opinions. ... If the whole exercise had truly been about impartial moderation, ... , to ensure that censorship in the new ...
    (uk.rec.cycling)
  • Re: [socmen] How about if *we* propose our own moderated group?
    ... >>> Moderation is one step away from censorship and soc.men has ... > would in effect be a form of censorship on soc.men. ... was that then folks wouldn't have to choose which one to post to, ... A better suggestion might be that cross-posts wouldn't be ...
    (soc.men)