Group Moderator

[Bob]

Just a quick question. Is there a moderator for this group? It seems like
non-rowing posts are outnumbering those related to rowing. Can a moderator
delete irrelevant posts? I'm sure this subject has been discussed before but
all those irrelevant posts must have a negative effect on site traffic.

Bob

[Jack]

Agreed

[don Vickers]

This is a Usenet Newsgroup and has no moderator. Usenet was created and popular in the 1980s well before the Internet was afflicted with significant uncivilized creatures.

Usenet is a highly distributed network of servers that maintain newsgroups Newsgroups can be moderated or unmoderated with the vast majority, like this one, as the latter. If this were a moderated newsgroup every post would require the approval of a moderator. This would eliminate the noise but would place a large amount of extra work on the victims designated to moderate the group.

The bottom line is that this old technology depends on having good citizens. There are more than enough cretins who are bad to make it annoying.

Should you wish to know more about usenet you can read some good information at or near https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

[Bob]

Don,

Thanks for the explanation and WIKI.

I doubt anyone wants to take on moderating which sounds a bit onerous when there is a lot of bad content submitted. It would be nice if one could delete bad content. I did notice that one can click in the three vertical dots to the right of a message to report the message as "abuse". Does anyone know if this causes a message to be deleted? It does imply some sort of content review.

Another option is a moderator who deletes bad content AFTER posting as opposed to a gatekeeper who prescreens content. This might be a reasonable option if it were allowed in the Usenet protocols and it would be less work for the moderator(s).

[Phil]

There is no moderator, but there certainly have been moderated groups - eg. uk.legal.moderated
Phil.