ron@wjvax.UUCP (Ron Christian) (02/06/85)
There's been a lot of hue and cry on moderation of
newsgroups. I'd like to know how our present moderated
'non-professional' newsgroups are going. How about
it moderators? Much traffic in mod.motss, mod.singles,
mod.movies? How much of that is reposted from net.whatever?
I'd check myself, but something happened to /usr/spool
over here and we lost everything up to about 2 days ago.
Pity. But never mind.
The point is, given a choice, do people even read the moderated
stuff? Or do they continue in their old anarchistic ways?
This came to me the other day as I was cleaning up our archive of
net.sources. (Thanks Chuq, I got it working.) I had neglected to
archive mod.sources and was wondering what I missed, if anything.
I discovered that my natural inclination was to totally ignore the
moderated groups. I wonder if this inclination is representitive
of netters in general?
--
Ron Christian (Watkins-Johnson Co. San Jose, Calif.)
{pesnta,twg,ios,qubix,turtlevax,tymix}!wjvax!ronlat@leopard.UUCP (Laurie) (02/07/85)
[i think i got off the subject a bit, but i decided to post it anyway and add my measly $0.000002 worth] > The point is, given a choice, do people even read the moderated > stuff? Or do they continue in their old anarchistic ways? > > I wonder if this inclination is representitive > of netters in general? > -- > > Ron Christian (Watkins-Johnson Co. San Jose, Calif.) > {pesnta,twg,ios,qubix,turtlevax,tymix}!wjvax!ron Well Ron, I, for one, would love to have moderated newsgroups. Unfortunalely, they do not get forwarded to us...someone up the line must not be running 2.10.2, but I don't have the time to track it down. I work full time (yes, I am one of those *nasty, despicable system administrators* :-), and there are barely enough hours in the day for me to do my job, let alone plow through 10**10 repetitive postings. I am also taking classes at night so that I can get my degree, which cuts into my "free time". I usually end up reading news (if at all) between 10pm and midnight -- not too much fun when you are bone tired. I still wonder how anyone can read the volume of stuff that goes through this network and still get their job done (i know some of you can do it, but most of us can't). After being a (mostly passive) user of the net for well over two years now, I was happy to hear that moderated groups were being tried out. There has been way too much abuse of this network; and I think Lauren, Mark, Chuq, Gene, and a few others would agree. The idea (I thought) originally behind the moderated groups was to try to get things under control. If you have been reading other newsgroups, like net.books or net.singles, (I will leave net.unix, net.unix-wizards, and a few other well known past fiascos out of this), you would see that the pornography debate and jeff sargent (no harm intended, jeff) issue has taken up most of the traffic in those newsgroups. If they were moderated, they would have (could have, whatever) been channelled off into either new newsgroups, compacted into a digest, or something, other than propagating 10**2 followups to every article, which either had nothing to do with the group they were being posted to, or said the same thing (ok, 10**2 is a bit high :-). I do not think of moderation as censorship, but it seems that there is a fine line between the two. I hope USENET can stay intact, be it through STARGATE or some other form of communication. If this means moderation, then I'm all for it, and if I can find some more time (maybe they'll change the days to allow 30 hours instead of only 24 :-) I'll try to help out any way I can. -- Laurie {ihnp4, gatech, allegra}!leopard!lat
msc@qubix.UUCP (Mark Callow) (02/07/85)
Here are my opinions of the moderated groups I look at:
net.annouce - very valuable, no duplication fromn anywhere else.
mod.map.* - very valuable, stops others from posting none map
stuff.
mod.movies - a waste. contains duplicates of some of the longer
(and better) reviews that appear in net.movies.
This group has upped the kbytes for no purpose.
net.movies is useful group with very little
stupid stuff and manageable volume.
mod.std.c - useful. Has a *lot* of material. To much for me
since I'm not that interested but there are
none of the religious wars of net.lang.c.
mod.singles - barely useful. Has no duplicate articles from net.singles.
Has a few anonymous articles that otherwise may not be seen.
Has a few other articles too but I couldn't see abandoning
net.singles for it.
I believe that the only way to provide the service of a moderated group, when
both net.? and mod.? exist, is to make the moderated group be simply a list
of useful articles in the net.? group. This isn't a new idea. Others
proposed it but it was shot down by the powers that be who claim that
moderation is needed to reduce the traffic. Well so far it has done the
exact opposite.
--
From the TARDIS of Mark Callow
msc@qubix.UUCP, qubix!msc@decwrl.ARPA
...{decvax,ucbvax}!decwrl!qubix!msc, ...{amd,ihnp4,ittvax}!qubix!mscjohn@genrad.UUCP (John Nelson) (02/09/85)
In article <1598@qubix.UUCP> msc@qubix.UUCP (Mark Callow) writes: >Here are my opinions of the moderated groups I look at: > Obviously you don't subscribe to mod.sources. John Nelson (moderator)
ron@brl-tgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (02/11/85)
> Well Ron, I, for one, would love to have moderated newsgroups. > Unfortunalely, they do not get forwarded to us...someone up > the line must not be running 2.10.2, but I don't have the time > to track it down. > Of course with STARGATE you wouldn't need to have to rely on the upstream sites to send you the moderated groups.