Few Newbie Qs about Usenet Newsgroups !

[Linux Booter]

Hello !

I have a few questions regarding newsgroups.

-How does one become a moderator of a usenet newsgroup?

-How to find if any newsgroup has a moderator or the newsgroup is not
moderated ?

- How to find out who is the moderator of a newsgroup

( I know posting these questions on a newsgroup is the obvious solution,
but please lets consider that the newsgroup has infrequent activity and
no one replies, then can obtain the above information from external
sources? Does usenet servers have websites etc to get the above
information..


I tried to google it but could not find the answer.

thanks.

[Jason Evans]

Linux Booter wrote:

> Hello !
>
> I have a few questions regarding newsgroups.

Hi LB,

I don't know if anyone will see this, but I'm crossposting this reply to
alt.fan.usenet which is a much more active newsgroup and might help other
people in also.

>
> -How does one become a moderator of a usenet newsgroup?

I can't speak for every hierarchy, but I do work on the Big-8 Management
board. Basically, if a moderated Big-8 newsgroup has been abandoned, we can
research who was the last moderator. If they don't want to moderate anymore,
then it can go to someone else.

Here's a simplified breakdown of how moderation works:

A user submits an article to a moderated newsgroup.
The news server that the user uses sends an email to the moderator.

The moderator sends the approved article to a news server with an "approved"
header. Many times, the user will also sign the message with a PGP/GPG key.

The news server that the moderator uses accepts the article and it then goes
online.

If the moderator denies the article, they may reply to the user with a
reason or they can simply delete it.

>
> -How to find if any newsgroup has a moderator or the newsgroup is not
> moderated ?

Here's a list of active newsgroups. The name and/or description usually says
what is moderated or not.

>
> - How to find out who is the moderator of a newsgroup
>

That's more difficult. I don't know if that list is publicly available
because it contains peoples' email addresses. If you want to know about a
specific group, I can look it up.

> ( I know posting these questions on a newsgroup is the obvious solution,
> but please lets consider that the newsgroup has infrequent activity and
> no one replies, then can obtain the above information from external
> sources? Does usenet servers have websites etc to get the above
> information..
>
>
> I tried to google it but could not find the answer.

Our website, https://www.big-8.org, is a good resource for research and
you'll find a lot on wikipedia also.

>
> thanks.

[Linux Booter]

Thanks for the very detailed reply. Sorry for my late reply.
Cheers