bob@acornrc.UUCP (Bob Weissman) (07/30/88)
In article <1573@edison.GE.COM>, rja@edison.GE.COM (rja) writes: > > The newsgroups news.admin and news.sysadmin have an awful lot of noise in > them these days. I think that the groups are important to have so that the > net and sysadmins in general can keep informed and semi-coordinated. > > I think that these two newsgroups would be better off as moderated newsgroups. I recently proposed moderation of news.admin, and received a half dozen supportive replies and one negative reply. People are concerned about the timeliness of moderated groups, reduction of connectivity, and overload on the part of the moderator. These are all valid points of concern. I have a possible solution to all of these problems: the distributed, automated moderator. I propose a program which would filter postings to news.admin and news.sysadmin based on whether the poster's name was found in the posting site's map entry. This identical program could be set up to run on several geographically distributed machines, with backbone sites forwarding the postings to the nearest site. This scheme would have the added advantage of encouraging administrators to keep map entries up to date. Comments? And any solutions to the problem of users invoking inews by hand to circumvent this filter? Or is this a problem with all moderated groups? Would it be better to modify inews so that only the user whose id is ROOTID (or is on some other list) could post to certain groups? In general, it is difficult to prevent emancipated women and obnoxious math grad students from circumventing the system if they are persistent enough. [I have increased the distribution of this message from the original poster's "na" to "world" and added cross-posting to news.admin and news.sysadmin so that the rest of the world's admins can get involved in this discussion if they so choose. Followups are directed back to news.groups.] -- Bob Weissman Internet: bob@acornrc.uucp UUCP: ...!{ ames | decwrl | oliveb | pyramid }!acornrc!bob Arpanet: bob%acornrc.uucp@ames.arc.nasa.gov