Moderated Net.misc

[alice!alb]

Whether or not it was decided at UNICOM, the matter still has
to be decided by the net, seeing as the majority of readers
were probably not at the BOF (me included, unfortunately).
I personally don't want to see any moderation on the net.
It defeats the purpose of the bulletin board system, which
I thin is a good idea.

[cbosgd!mark]

As Adam points out, he was not there in San Diego. At the BOF,
it was decided that, as an experiment, we would try a moderated
version of net.misc. Frankly, after reading this newsgroup for
the past few weeks, I'm convinced that we need, at the very least,
some kind of topic sorting in this newsgroup. It's pretty hard
to follow five parallel discussions in one newsgroup. The moderated
net.misc will be called net.misc.mod, so people will have a choice
of which flavor to read (or even both).

At the BOF, it came out that moderators do a number of different
things, such as
Digesting (e.g. packing several related messages into one)
Filtering (keeping mistakes off, usually by discussing it
with the submittor until an agreement is reached)
Sorting (so that topics come out together)
Editing (removing duplicates, fixing typos)
Answering (providing the answer to a question right there
with the question, to avoid lots of followups that
just answer the same question)
We don't have any idea which of these are appropriate for USENET.
They all work well with mailing lists, but USENET is not based on
mailing lists. My personal feelings are as follows:

Digesting: this was done on the ARPANET primarily to cut down on
traffic volume and system load. We can get the same effect with
netnews by batching articles during transmission, so we don't
really need digesting.

Filtering: this is important. As Lauren pointed out, this is not
censorship, it's just keeping the mistakes off. If someone posts
something that the moderator feels in inappropriate, instead of
letting it through, the moderator starts up a mail discussion with
the submittor explaining why. Usually, if something is kept off,
it's because (a) the moderator gave the answer directly to the
submittor, (b) it belonged on another mailing list/newsgroup, to
which the submittor sent it, or (c) they agree it was inappropriate.
Lauren could not think of any examples where someone wanted to say
something and was prevented from doing so. On USENET, we have two
possible filtering mechanisms. One is to allow the moderator to
cancel anything. The other is to have all news go through the
moderator before it goes out.

Sorting: keeping subdiscussions together. This is easy if all news
goes through a moderator. But it is probably better to do what
notes does: have readnews group it at the time someone reads the news.

Editing: The main advantage here is to avoid 10 identical followups
to a question saying the same thing. The alternative is to encourage
people to just reply instead of following up. Doesn't work very well,
but we might improve the situation somewhat by at least making the
person about to post a followup aware of other followups that have
arrived on their machine.

Answering: I don't know how this would work in the USENET world,
although perhaps appointing one person to answer questions first
might avoid duplicates.

While this experiment seems like a good idea, it may be some time
before the technical problems can be solved and an implementation
is ready for experimentation. So don't hold your breath.

Mark Horton