nadel@aerospace.aero.org (Miriam H. Nadel) (10/19/90)
This is in response to some email to the moderators and to some personal email. There are a couple of things I think we need to mention about how the moderation works and how to communicate with us and the like. First off, if your software permits you can post to soc.feminism the same as you do to any other group and the post will automatically be sent to the moderation program. Or you can mail directly to soc.feminism@ncar.ucar.edu and get the same effect. What this does is call a program which sends the post to one of the moderators. The whole thing is reasonably random as to which of us it gets to. You can also mail directly to a moderator. If you do this, it is best to make it clear that it's intended to be a soc.feminism posting to avoid ambiguity. (If there's a question about whether some piece of mail is intended to be posted, we'll generally ask, but making it clear avoids that delay.) Secondly, you can send mail to all of the moderators by sending it to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu. This is the way to go for administrative matters. For example, if you posted something and it never showed up, send mail. In that particular case, I suggest you wait about a week before assuming your post got lost as there are delays. (For example, I must often travel on short notice and if it's only for a couple of days I don't have my name removed from the moderator list temporarily. So it could be 4 or 5 days before I see something sent to me. Also, people do get sick or swamped at work. Plus there are always general delays - internet problems or bad UUCP links or whatever - which can't be foreseen.) All postings are responded to. If you don't get mail about a post and you don't see it appear, then send mail to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu and we'll try to track it down. If you write a long article, it is probably a good idea to keep a copy of it around until you do hear back. As for rejections, generally we try to filter out flames and to stick to the subject. I find that very few postings get rejected. I more often ask for rewrites. In borderline cases, the moderators do exchange mail among ourselves. If you receive a rejection, you are free to try sending the posting to another moderator. You can also, of course, post to unmoderated groups. Right now there's a bit of controversy about moderators including comments in posted articles. My personal feeling is that it is best if we limit those to administrative matters (e.g. suggesting that followups be directed to some other newsgroup) or to brief comments that would suggest directions for the discussion to take (no more than a line or two). Basically, I'm suggesting that line by line rebuttals by the moderators are inappropriate since it's easy enough to just write another article in rebuttal. This issue is by no means closed, though, and we probably need more feedback. (Such feedback should be either via mail to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu or posted in news.misc - or is news.groups better?) Miriam Nadel -- "The readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction." - Sarah Caudwell nadel@aerospace.aero.org