[Periodic Post] Soc.Religion.Mormon Charter

[Periodic Post]

CHARTER: soc.religion.mormon

[P1] This group, soc.religion.mormon, will provide a forum for
courteous discussion of issues pertaining to the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons).

[P2] Acceptable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
church practices and policies, sharing "how-to" ideas for
implementation of church programs, philosophical discussions involving
Mormon doctrine, church history (including other restoration
religions), Latter-day Saint scriptures, lifestyle issues, Mormon
culture.

[P3] Moderation Policy

The newsgroup will employ a combination of automated and human
moderation to enforce the charter. All articles will pass through
automoderation, including those submitted by moderators.

An automoderator host will screen every submitted article and, based
upon the moderation script, take one of three actions:

- accept the article and post it to the newsgroup.
- queue the article for review by the moderators.
- queue the article for rejection by the moderators.

Article Review:

Articles will be reviewed if they are extremely long, consist mostly
of quotations from other posts, or contain words that indicate
incivility. Certain threads or individual posters may also be marked
for review. All articles reviewed by the moderators will be posted to
the newsgroup except those that are judged to be inflammatory speech,
unwarranted repetition, or violations of the charter. Judgment will
be exercised to reduce the number of articles containing flames,
trolls, offensive content, and me-too trailers. Two moderators must
agree to reject these articles.

Article Rejection:

An article will be queued for rejection by the moderators if the
automoderator determines that the article meets any of the criteria
listed below. Articles which meet any of these criteria will be
considered to be in violation of the charter.

- Obscene and/or vulgar language
- Encoded binary files
- Crossposting to multiple newsgroups
- Quoted statements that are either attributed to, or
unmistakably part of, the LDS temple ceremony.

These violations will be confirmed by one of the human moderators
before rejection. These restrictions apply only to articles posted in
this newsgroup, soc.religion.mormon.

(Two separate documents, one describing in greater detail the
moderation policies and procedures, and the other providing
information about LDS worship in temples, will be posted periodically
to the newsgroup, and will also be available via FTP and WWW.)

[P4] Selection of Moderators

The moderation panel will consist of four or five moderators. The
acting moderators will select, by unanimous consent, replacements or
additions to their ranks. In order to foster a spirit of acceptance
and cooperation within the newsgroup's participants, at least one
moderator will be a member in good standing of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah,
USA, and at least one moderator will not be a member of the LDS
church. If this should prove impossible, a panel of four members will
continue to function until a moderator of the needed category can be
found. The religious affiliation of the moderators will be public
information.

A moderator's term ends upon voluntary resignation or unanimous
agreement of the remaining moderators. The reason for a moderator's
removal, or the fact of his or her voluntary resignation, will be
posted to the newsgroup.

[P5] Two system administrators, a principal administrator and a
backup, will be appointed by the moderation panel by a majority vote
of the panel. A moderator cannot act as a system administrator, and
vice versa. The role of the system administrator will be to ensure
that the moderation host and Automoderator are operating according to
the policy set forth by the moderation panel.

END CHARTER.

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Copies of this document are available on the s.r.m homepage
http://soc.religion.com

Note: Due to increasing amounts of Spam, we have changed the address for
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