bstempleton (11/30/82)
It seems to me that net traffic these days is getting heavier and heavier. Most people have noticed this, I am sure. There are more and more novice users making more and more mistakes. Having been on the net for over 1.5 years, I know that countless old discussions have come up again to be rehashed and rehashed. Since the net is paid for with real dollars by various companies etc., we face the fact that if the trend continues the net will collapse under its own weight. Those familiar with the arpanet will know that exactly the same thing happened on that net a few years ago. They had distribution of all messages to every person on a mailing list. (Because they have greater bandwidth resources, they are able to use straight mail.) There came a time, however, when one of the larger groups brought the entire net to a halt and there have been other instances of bad messages that have brought down the wrath of the governing DCA. Their solution was to digestify, and include moderators - something that is possible on a network as connected as the arpanet. We have a truly distributed network, so we can't quite apply their solution, but we can do the following: Create the concept of "novice" and "experienced" net users. The idea is essentially this: Every newsgroup should have, on some reasonably central site, a moderator of some sort. This person should be a person who had read the group since its starting or for some length of time. inews should be modified to test the status of a posting user. For example, it could test if the .newsrc file is less than 2 months old. If the user is a novice, (and this includes root users and system administrators who are among the worst offenders) all posted news gets sent by mail to the moderator's address. Experienced users get to post directly. (Novice users will be allowed, perhaps to post to their own site or group of sites directly if desired, ie. when costs are low. This would only apply to net groups.) The moderator would have a simple editor to accept postings, able with one character to direct them to the net or send simple form letters of various types indicating why the message was not posted to the sender. Thus reading this news would be little effort more for the moderator than reading the group is now. The rest of the net would be saved the cost and time of all the 300 explanations of what foobar means or which hamburger is better. The arpanet has been able to find good moderators, so I am sure we can as well. It might make sense to digestify the output on a once per day basis to cut down uucp overhead costs as well. They could also be digestified into several groups by topic, depending on the software capability. It should be noted that it would be nice if all followups, even if by an expert went to the moderator. It should be an option for experts only to post directly. The moderator need have no powers, for any user seriously interested in posting what has been rejected by the moderator can do it if they want to, since news has no security. We might even allow an option for novices to post directly that puts a "Novice posted directly" flag on the message. This means that any novice abusing this will get lots of mail from the net if they bypass the moderator and the net thinks the moderator was correct for canning the message. The modifications to the software are simple, except one: News articles posted by the moderator will have difficulty getting good reply strings. With internet addressing, this will not be a problem, but in the meantime the software will have to be able to generate good reply strings for messages via the moderator. This is a pretty radical proposal, I must admit, but I think it's workable to some degree. There might be a problem getting enough moderators, but if so we can concentrate them on the noisy groups, just as the arpanet does. Comments would be appreciated. General flames to /dev/null, basic critical comment by mail to me, and since this is the shape of the net we're talking about, post original ideas on the subject to net.news. Brad Templeton <bstempleton@watmath.uucp>
mark (11/30/82)
Brad Templeton has some valid concerns. (Perhaps this is an issue to take up at Unicom?) However, the moderator concept has some flaws as well as the obvious advantages. The primary flaws are: (1) Speed. When all news has to go through a moderator, it takes much longer to get out to the net. Even if the moderator digestifies the newsgroup on a daily basis, there is the time delay for mail to reach the moderator, for the moderator to get around digestifying it, posting it, and then the delay for the news to get back from the moderator's site. This might average 2-3 days, which is drastically slower than the 1 day worst case turnaround we have now. Within BTL, we get news faster than the "information bulletin" blurbs that come around - I found out about the divestature with netnews 5 hours earlier than I got the blurb. (2) Finding a moderator. Some of the groups, like net.general, net.followup, net.misc, net.jokes, would be a thankless job. (3) What do you do when the moderator goes on vacation or gets lazy? Look at what happens to unix-wizards (moderated at the gateway) when Geoff has other things to do. I've seen stuff delayed several weeks. (4) Traffic. The ARPANET has found that any site with a moderator gets very heavy traffic coming in/going out. UUCP can't handle heavy traffic nearly as well as the ARPANET. While some of this is caused by (still) mailing a separate copy to everybody on the list, some people have had to move to another site to moderate mailing lists. Some mailing lists did not have a home for months (e.g. sf-lovers, I think) and so were cut off for that time. (5) Creating new groups. You have to find a moderator in each case, which takes time. This might be solved by making each newsgroup decide separately whether to be moderated, and having the software somehow decide that postings to a certain newsgroup automagically get mailed to the moderator. (6) Replies. We all know what a pain it is to try to reply to a digest when you're half way through reading it. This could be solved by either a digest reader or by posting the moderated articles separately. (I see no reason to digestify for efficiency, since news articles themselves can be batched.) (7) Censorship. The moderator's job includes censoring out garbage, and some may feel this is too much power for any one person. The advantage is that you could have higher quality stuff, since you would avoid Paddy O'Furniture and Foobar. Discussion invited. Mark
Onyx:harymudd (11/30/82)
I think Brad has a pretty good idea. One thing of note would be the possibility of backup moderators, since many machines on the net tend to die. I would definitely be willing to moderate my own newsgroup, net.games.pbm, which I have seen nobody use anyway. One major problem with his proposal, though, would be the age of the news user. I, myself, like having a sorted .newsrc file and a new one must be created every time I sort, i.e. I wouldn't have a file more than a week old! And I know certain people that might be administrators but wouldn't let my stuff on just because they dislike me. At any rate, for those interested, I will be reposting the start up message for net.games.pbm in January. Thank you and good night...
bstempleton (12/02/82)
Some clarification: Usenet traffic need not be increased much at the moderator's site, which currently gets all articles in and reposts them to all the other sites it sends to. In the moderator case, traffic is increased only by the amount of sending to one extra site - the site the message would have come from in the first place. We don't need a moderator for most groups - same as arpanet. Smaller volume groups can get by without one. A program can count articles/week somewhere and inform somebody when a moderator is needed. Extra delay is a problem, but some say it's better because it cuts down on crap. The only thing to say here is that it is a price we would have to pay. "btl." groups need not be moderated, for example. Since there would be an option on inews to bypass the moderator and post directly, anybody with information that really is "news" and not just opinion, can post it that way. This also gets around the censorship question. If we can't use create time on the inode then we can put a timestamp somewhere else with no problem.