Re: Demoderation of sci.nanotech
- From: John Novak <john.novak@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:29:34 -0500
On Oct 27, 8:26=A0pm, Jim Logajan <Jam...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John Novak and I feel the time has come to de-moderate this newsgroup,in
providing we can convince system administrators to perform the switch.
Removing moderation would of course allow posts to immediately appear on
the group - the group would not disappear. Just the evil censors! ;-)
The reason we wish to remove moderation is fairly simple: moderation
requires at least a daily check for valid postings if one wants to mainta=
a minimum reasonable latency - but there have been little or no postings =to
justify further use of our time or burdening any reasonably qualifieds
person with such a task.
The e-mail submission address to which posts are sent gets some spam (all
such addresses seem to eventually become targets) and even with spam trap=
like Spam Assassin we are forced each day to deal with such posts. (Thesen
are messages directed at the e-mail address itself and would not appear o=
the group if it were unmoderated.)t
As noted, we are loathe to burden anyone else with moderating a group tha=
has become so silent yet requires daily attention (through vacations,he
sickness, surgery, etc.), yet it seems inappropriate to ask that it be
removed since it still seems to have occasional, if rather rare, use.
Perhaps better days lie ahead.
I will eventually be contacting the "Big-8 Management Board" [1]
(http://www.big-8.org/) and probably the database administrator for the
moderated newsgroup e-mail submission addresses atwww.isc.org[2] about
their procedures and requirements for demoderation.
If demoderation is not allowed to be attempted then we feel it would be
better to direct users to other nanotechnology forums on the Internet and
let this newsgroup "go dark" indefinitely without "formally" abandoning t=
group.l-
[1] The "Big-8 Management Board" holds the only generally accepted centra=
authority authentication key that is included in the newsgroup control
messages that are used to add, remove, and change newsgroups; but Usenet
newsgroup providers are the final authorities on what is carried on the
servers they own, so they are under no obligation to follow what the
"Board's" control messages request.
[2] The ISC is only one of a small number of entities that contains a
canonical list of the e-mail submission addresses for all the moderated
Usenet groups. If the ISC chooses to no longer consider a moderated
newsgroup as moderated, then any Usenet newsgroup provider who chooses to
try and maintain said group as moderated will cause problems for its own
users but typically no one else.
For the record, James speaks with my voice on this subject. I haven't
been able to participate in the discussion because I've been away on
travel, but I certainly agree with him, with respects to demoderatng
or abandoning the group.
However, while James has handled the moderated/unmoderated issue, I
have some additional thoughts on continuing/abandoning the newsgroup,
and these thoughts relate back to the purpose of the group. What *is*
the purpose-- or more realistically, the function-- of sci.nanotech?
As I see it, the group really only serves two functions:
1) As a sort of news distribution point for new developments in
nanotechnology, and
2) As a sort of (slightly) social venue for discussions about
nanotechnology.
The first is paraphrased directly from JoSH's original Proposal
posting, where he envisioned himself as the person-- the moderator--
collecting information from the outside world as necessary. The
second is a strictly functional observation of what the group has
been. The relevant questions here are, is sci.nanotech doing anything
for people that they cannot do themselves, or that does not exist
elsewhere? I think the answers are no.
Bear in mind, JoSH's Proposal posting happened in 1988, over twenty
years ago. Usenet was an obscure, but up-and-coming technology used
mostly in universities and big research organizations. The Web, for
all intents and purposes, simply did not exist, although Berners-Lee
may have had bits and pieces of the idea working on scattered machines
in his office. Certainly search engines, browsers, news aggregators
and the like did not exist. It is now 2008, and all of those things
exist. For quite some time during my moderation tenure, the most
interesting posts-- the ones I would approve with barely a glance--
were from Eugene Leitl and Gina Miller, summarizing developments for
the past interval, usually about a month. But as time passed, I
noticed something: More and more of their news was becoming "old
news" by the time I had read it, and they were duplicating each
other. This is because, at the time, I was customizing and refining
my own personal search engines, news aggregators, etc. In short,
technology has moved on to the point where it is easier for me (and by
extension, every reader here) to customize my news sources than it is
to get the news from here.
As far as I am concerned, that does grave damage to the first
function.
And the second function simply has not been functioning for quite some
time. Years, by my reckoning. Conversations are few, far between,
short-lived, and tend to be marked by irate tones and bickering. We
could argue and debate the reasons for this, but I think it is
principally a general decline in the use of usenet as a whole, coupled
with a lack of utility for this newsgroup in particular. Some have
suggested moving the newsgroup to a web-based forum; that's certainly
a possibility, although I'm not volunteering to help or moderate.
(I'm a busier person than I was a few years ago, and I'm probably
going back to school next year and will be even busier.) James,
however, notes the existence of already pre-existing discussion
groups. Do none of these groups fit?
Ultimately, that is a personal question, and one I can't answer for
anyone but myself.
But I do note that no one actually needs permission to start up a web-
based discussion forum anymore... and frankly, for the amount of
traffic I expect such a discussion board to generate, I don't think it
would be terribly expensive.
As far as I am concerned, the second function hasn't functioned for
years, and its chances for resurrection in any form lie elsewhere.
So with that said, is there still a rationale for this group to exist?
I'm not certain that there is.
I am quite certain that whatever rationale may still remain does not
warrant the moderation burden.
.
- References:
- Demoderation of sci.nanotech
- From: Jim Logajan
- Demoderation of sci.nanotech
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