Moderator vacancy investigation - RSPWM

[Stephen Thomas Cole]

I am writing in regards to the moderated newsgroup
rec.sport.pro-wrestling.moderated. This group is currently unuseable and I
would appreciate your help in getting it up and running again.

I posted a test message to the group in May 2016 but it never showed up nor
was rejected. I did some sleuthing and eventually found one of the original
listed moderators. Christopher Zimmerman, was active on twitter (handle
@CRZ) so I fired a Tweet at him asking if he still moderated RSPWM, to
which he replied:

23rd May 2016 "I still moderate RSPWI and RSPWM, such as they are. I'll
reject your test message now."

So, happy to have received confirmation that there was still one moderator
active and that the system was apparently still working, I submitted a
couple of messages over the next couple of weeks. They never showed up in
the group, so I followed up with Chris on Twitter again, to which he
replied:

29th Jul 2016 "Oh! Sorry about that! If this will be a regular habit I'll
set up a text notification to let me know in real time"

Expecting the messages to appear once he'd authorised them, once they
hadn't shown up the next day I contacted him on Twitter again asking if
there was a problem, to which he replied:

30th Jul 2016
"Honestly I have no clue; my university dropped Usenet years ago. I'll
look around this weekend, might need a reminder"
"Approval is still in my sendmail queue - I have contacted the guy who ran
the news gateway to see if it's still functional"

Following up to Chris on Twitter for an update a week later, he replied:

6th Aug 2016 "The gateway died years ago, I was told. Sorry, didn't check
my email due to work taking over my life all week"

So I asked him what his intention was in terms of getting the group working
again, to which he replied:

8th Aug 2016 "Yes, will bring it back to working condition, but currently
no timetable for when I will/can get to it."

A month goes by before I follow up again for an update, to which he
replies:

6th Sep 2016 "I haven't been able to set up my own gateway or find one I
can use.
Have you considered using the unmoderated group?"

I sent him another chase for an update a month later, to which he replied:

4th Oct 2016 "Emailed the Big 8 board, got some names but haven't followed
up, so....no, not much news but I didn't wanna lie to you"

I sent another enquiry a few days ago, asking if there had been any
movement in getting the group operational, to which he replied:

6th Feb 2017 "No."

Asking him immediately thereafter if it was likely to happen has elicited
no further response.

In short, I'd love to see this group working again. Unmoderated
pro-wrestling Usenet groups are in a bad way, over-run with politics trolls
and general madness, and have been that way for years now. There do seem to
be a few folk interested in talking about pro-wrestling on Usenet, but
conversation is obliterated almost instantly by noise. A moderated group
would supply the filter required to allow on-topic discussion to at least
have a chance of taking root.

RSPWM has a moderator who is contactable (Christopher Zimmerman, on Twitter
@CRZ) but unable to fulfill his role due to apparent technical
difficulties. I'm reading between the lines here, but I do think that there
are also motivation issues at play; Chris apparently hasn't been able to
make the relatively trivial effort of sourcing a new Usenet connection over
the last several months from identifying the problem, so whether or not his
heart would still be in it is open to debate.

I have politely floated the notion of him handing over moderatorship of the
group a couple of times when conversing as above, but each time he made no
comment to that point. I would be very happy to take on the moderatorship
of RSPWM, including taking on the cost of hiring a server to house
moderation software.

I would appreciate your insight on all this, and any help you can give in
moving this forward.

--
STC / M0TEY /
http://twitter.com/ukradioamateur

[David Solimano]

On Fri, 10 Feb 2017 20:49:52 CST, Stephen Thomas Cole
<use...@stephenthomascole.com> wrote:

>I am writing in regards to the moderated newsgroup
>rec.sport.pro-wrestling.moderated. This group is currently unuseable and I
>would appreciate your help in getting it up and running again.
>

> ...

>
>I have politely floated the notion of him handing over moderatorship of the
>group a couple of times when conversing as above, but each time he made no
>comment to that point. I would be very happy to take on the moderatorship
>of RSPWM, including taking on the cost of hiring a server to house
>moderation software.
>
>I would appreciate your insight on all this, and any help you can give in
>moving this forward.

Can offer moral support, sounds like a good plan. Can learn how to
offer technical support, if you need assistance. Not sure about
political support, I'm no Big 8 board insider.
--
David Solimano
da...@solimano.org