(Followups directed to poster by default. If followup to newsgroups is
desired, edit your headers on followup to drop
rec.radio.amateur.moderated from the Newsgroups line, else your article
will be rejected.)
The rec.radio.amateur.moderated newsgroup enters its 3rd year of
operation this month. Since its creation in February of 2007, we have
approved nearly 3,000 articles about amateur radio and closely related
subjects. We would like to thank our readers and posters for their
quality contributions to our newsgroup.
When we first started out, consistent with our newsgroup's Charter and
Posting Guidelines:
http://www.panix.com/~rram/usenet/rram/
we allowed discussion threads to be posted to our newsgroup only. Our
moderation software is programmed to automatically reject any
crossposts. The one exception has been periodic information postings
that are crossposted to rec.radio.info, rec.answers, and/or
news.answers.
Some moderated newsgroups, such as those in the comp.lang.perl.* and
misc.kids.* hierarchies, started accepting crosspostings to appropriate
unmoderated newsgroups after a suitable waiting period from their
initial creation. Now that our newsgroup is well-established and
carried at most major sites, we would like to implement this customary
followup and allow some crossposting. We would propose to allow
simultaneous crossposting (i.e., one article, with all newsgroups
specified at once on the Newsgroups line in the headers) to
rec.radio.amateur.moderated and one other unmoderated newsgroup in the
rec.radio.amateur.*, alt.radio.amateur.*, and alt.ham-radio.*
hierarchies only.
Pros:
- Allows the moderated and unmoderated newsgroups to share discussion
threads of common interest, without propagating more than one set of
articles to news, or showing them more than once in a newsreader.
Presently, threads of common interest have to run in parallel, with
different sets of followups, and requiring readers to have to follow
two threads, possibly with duplicate articles, in different
newsgroups. We have seen multiple examples of this happening in the
amateur-radio-related newsgroups over the past 2 years.
- Provides the default action of submitting articles and followups to
moderator review, as news servers will forward to us for approval any
article that contains rec.radio.amateur.moderated on the Newsgroups
line. This allows the moderated newsgroup crossposting to serve as a
"guardian" or "sentinel" to discourage threads from getting hijacked
into running off-topic or into personal abuse. This may also
encourage posters to use the underutilized rec.radio.amateur.misc or
.policy newsgroups as crossposting targets for articles that might
otherwise be posted only to .moderated.
- Readers of the unmoderated newsgroups will enjoy high-quality,
on-topic, discussion threads that would otherwise require subscribing
to and reading a moderated newsgroup. Readers of the moderated
newsgroup will enjoy high-quality, on-topic, discussion threads that
would otherwise require subscribing to and reading other unmoderated
newsgroups. Those unmoderated newsgroups may contain articles of
widely varying degrees of quality and topic relevance.
- Participation in this crossposting scheme is completely voluntary.
Posters of initial articles in threads will make the voluntary choice
to add rec.radio.amateur.moderated and one other unmoderated newsgroup
to the Newsgroups line when posting. Those following up to these
crossposted threads will make a voluntary choice whether to keep
rec.radio.amateur.moderated or any other newsgroup on the Newsgroups
line, or remove them. Followups may be directed by default to any
subset of the newsgroups on the Newsgroups line (or via E-mail to
"poster") by specifying them on an appropriate Followup-To line. In
short, you control what you post, where you post it, and what default
destinations you want for any followups. This proposed crossposting
scheme does not change any of these long-standing features of Usenet
and newsreader software.
Cons:
- This will subject all such simultaneously crossposted articles to
moderator review by us. If they do not meet the Charter and Posting
Guidelines of rec.radio.amateur.moderated, they will be rejected. We
will attempt to work with submitters to let them know what is
happening, and how their articles can be fixed for eventual approval.
However, rejected articles that were submitted anonymously without a
traceable/derivable E-mail address or identity will have to be dropped
silently without feedback to the unreachable submitter.
- Moderator review will introduce some posting delay. However, it has
been our experience over the last 2 years that with our large
moderation team distributed across many time zones, and the automation
provided by our moderation software, we can turn submissions around
relatively quickly, often within an hour.
- Many newsreaders do not give clear feedback to the user what
newsgroups in which a given article appears, nor to what newsgroups a
followup to that article will be sent by default. We expect to
initially have to handle a few confused, possibly angry, submitters
who will insist that they did not intend to post to a moderated
newsgroup. We are willing to provide the necessary polite feedback
and user education to them to allow this crossposting scheme to work
effectively. This will help ensure that the scheme is only used by
those who are reasonably aware of the various pros and cons. We hope
that this problem will diminish with time and greater user awareness.
- Not all newsgroups, especially those in the alt.* hierarchy, are
carried at all sites. Users may find themselves following up by
default to newsgroups that do not exist on their local news server,
possibly resulting in article rejection from their server. Those
users would have to edit their Newsgroups line for successful
resubmission. We will work with users to get appropriate newsgroups
added to their local servers, as well as with Panix to get those
newsgroups added to Panix's server. However, as with default
followups described in the previous paragraph, we expect to have to go
through an initial period of user and news service provider education
and polite feedback. We hope that this problem also will diminish
with time and greater user awareness.
We propose to enforce this scheme in our moderation software as follows:
- Submissions simultaneously crossposted to more than 2 newsgroups will
be automatically rejected with a rejection form letter (same as what
happens now to submissions that are posted to more than 1 newsgroup).
- Submissions that contain newsgroups on the Newsgroups line other than
approved newsgroups in the rec.radio.amateur.*, alt.radio.amateur.*,
or alt.ham-radio.* hierarchies will be automatically rejected with a
rejection form letter.
Approved rec.radio.amateur.* newsgroups are those that are currently
listed in the latest version of the "List of Big Eight Newsgroups"
which is crossposted monthly to news.announce.newgroups, news.groups,
and news.lists.misc.
Approved alt.radio.amateur.* and alt.ham-radio.* newsgroups are those
that have been created consistent with the suggestions in "So You Want
to Create an Alt Newsgroup" at:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/alt-creation-guide/
We will make every reasonable effort to keep our list of approved
newsgroups up-to-date. In case we have overlooked any, and a
submission is rejected in error as a result, the rejected submitter
can E-mail us at our administrative contact address (in the signature
at the bottom of this article, and the default Reply-To for the
rejection message) requesting that it be added, and that the article
be approved. We may still choose to reject articles crossposted to
any alt.* newsgroup with an inappropriate name, including obscene
language, embedded name-calling, or encouragement of unlawful conduct.
To help publicize this new editorial policy, we will update our Posting
Guidelines, which are posted to the moderated newsgroup on the 15th of
each month. Changes to our Posting Guidelines are indicated by an
updated date in the Revision: auxiliary header at the top of the body,
as well as "change bars" ('|') after each modified line of text. We
will also add a short announcement, posted on the 1st of each month and
cross-posted to the unmoderated newsgroups, restating this new editorial
policy, and encouraging crossposted submissions.
Since this is a change to our newsgroup's editorial policies, and with
some impact to the readers and posters of the unmoderated newsgroups, we
would like to solicit 30 days of direct feedback and/or public
discussion regarding this proposed change. For example, we would be
interested to know if allowing crossposting to one other unmoderated
newsgroup is enough, or if two would be preferable. We feel that more
than two additional crossposted newsgroups greatly increases the
probability of misconduct or accidental misposting that may result in
article rejection by us. Also, should this scheme be opened up to
uk.radio.amateur and aus.radio.amateur.* as well? You may send us
E-mail directly to our administrative contact address below, which is
the default Followup-To/Reply-To for this article. You may also discuss
this publicly on the unmoderated newsgroups. In fact, we cannot stop
you from doing so. We will make every reasonable effort to incorporate
any feedback and suggestions. If we decide to implement this proposal,
we will make a public announcement shortly after the end of the 30-day
discussion period.
(Followups directed to poster by default. If followup to newsgroups is
desired, edit your headers on followup to drop
rec.radio.amateur.moderated from the Newsgroups line, else your article
will be rejected.)
--
rec.radio.amateur.moderated Admin
rec-radio-amateur-moderated-requ...@panix.com
