rgreene@ricecsvm.rice.edu (Bob Greene) (11/27/90)
As most of you are aware, I changed jobs a while back (early July '90). Because of this, I am no longer situated geographically near Rice. This has resulted in somewhat problematic access to the systems that Sunspots resides on. The company that I now work for has a "difficult" interface to the Internet (ie: it's relatively slow from my side of our internal network and going to the "distant" side of the Internet from where it is connected, and relatively difficult to directly pass through). Because of this, I am not in the position to move -all- of Sunspots with me. I have moved the distribution point for the Usenet articles to a local machine which saves me a lot of time accessing machines at Rice; however, some work must still be done physically on Rice's machines. Sunspots is currently two weeks backlogged. I am working on that backlog and feel that it will eventually be reduced to something more reasonable. However, I am not without other tasks and the moderation of Sunspots takes a non-neglible amount of time to do. I do not feel that I will be able to guarantee the short turn around time that Sunspots previously had any time in the near future. Because of this, I would once again like to open the age old question of whether all things, even moderation, should be done in moderation. [:)] In all seriousness, over the last few months, I have received several suggestions as to how the task of Sunspots/comp.sys.sun could be broken apart or reduced. I will excerpt a few short ones below. I welcome any comments from Sunspots readers concerning what course you feel would be best to allow Sunspots to meet it's purpose (a TIMELY delivery of information with a minimum of "noise"). Please note that although I have previously vocally opposed un-moderating Sunspots, this is now becoming a viable alternative in my mind. Each time I handle a 2 week old submission and see "URGENT: I need help right away", that option becomes more real. [[And here's where I break one of the unspoken rules of net.etiquette and post private email to the net. My apologies to Mike and Ken, but sometimes submitters can summarize things better than I can :).]] *** X-From: cherry@mgh-coffee.Harvard.EDU (Mike Cherry) Prehaps now is the time to split up comp.sys.sun into sub groups. Comp.sys.mac has recently done this. The comp.sys.mac group will be removed on August 1st. Many subgroups were created for the diverse topics which had all used comp.sys.mac in the past. The majority of the subgroups are not moderated, however a couple are moderated. I think this type of change would be good for the following reasons: 1) The sun community is less dependant on a moderator. No one can complain about turn-around times and once folks got use to the subgroups it would be easier to pick the information you spend time on. More effective use of Usenet via subgroups. Less likely to miss something because I was one of 50 messages in the group that day. 2) Moderated subgroups, for example comp.sys.sun.announce, could be used for important messages. These groups would also be low volume and could have different moderators. 3) If the digest form to the mailing list is still wanted it could be produced from a collection of the moderated subgroups and/or selected articles from the unmoderated groups. A revolving group of moderators could handle this by just incorporating articles they receive via Usenet. This mailing list could still be distributed via a single site as well as being posted to a newsgroup such as comp.sys.sun.digest *** X-From: km@mathcs.emory.edu (Ken Mandelberg) I've written to you before to express this opinion, but think its even more relevant now given the situation you describe in your posting. I feel strongly that a great deal of the value of comp.sys.sun is the timely turn around that Usenet groups afford. While I think it was admirable that you were previously in a position to moderate on a very timely basis, it looks like it is not very realistic to expect you will be able to continue doing that in your new job. Frankly, I was both amazed and impressed that you were able to do it so well in the past, given the volume. I doubt that another moderator, even with a good internet connection, could do as well. I propose that consideration be given again to further decoupling the mailing list from the usenet group. I suggest making the newsgroup an automated reflector, with moderation done only on the mailing list. At the very least I suggest you do this for periods when you are not available to moderate. I know in the past you have disagreed with me on this. If you still do, I think you should at least bring the issue up for discussion in the group, and have a vote if there seems to be support for it.