ASDLC moderated group?

Does anyone know what it would take to make a usenet newsgroup
moderated? The amount of spam is reaching the kind of level where I
start missing legit posts. Someone should have the authority to remove
all obvious "money maker" spamming posts.

"H.L" wrote:

Does anyone know what it would take to make a usenet newsgroup
moderated? The amount of spam is reaching the kind of level where I
start missing legit posts. Someone should have the authority to remove
all obvious "money maker" spamming posts.

Note well - There is zero possibility that ASDLC will ever be
converted to moderated. No UseNet server ever retroactively
moderates any group ever. It would be a new group with a new
name like misc.health.diet.low-carb.moderated. Someone
could post a pointer on a regular basis to let newbies know
where to look.

I'm on the moderation team for news.groups.proposals, on the
newsgroups mentors mailing list, a backup moderator for
news.admin.moderation and I've been through the process of
getting a moderated group (soc.religion.asatru) created so I
know much about the process and the requirements.

A moderated parallel group has been discussed off-group by a
short list of folks on and off for a couple of years at this point.
There has not been enough interest to proceed.

1) Someone needs to write an RFD - Request For Discussion - and
post it to news.announce.newgroups and news.groups.proposals.
There's a template available for this and I help folks through it
regularly for other groups. I view this as the easy part.

2) Several people need to volunteer to be moderators. This
means either approve messages as they come in, set up filters
to automate the process, or some combination. Anyone
reasonably smart can learn quickly and anyone already tech
savvy can pick it up almost on the spot. Folks with prior
moderation experience (newsgroups, mailing lists, web fora)
are preferred as most of the moderation work is judgement not
technical. I'm already on a few teams so I'm maxxed out for
this. Ideally folks distributed geographically works best - One
team I'm on has members in NZ, UK and 2 US time zones.
This is neither the easy part nor the hard part but off-group
discussions so far have produced zero volunteers.

3) Then follow the discussion on NGP and take into account
suggestions. Follow the sequence of steps as described in the
documents on www.big8.org. I also view this as the easy part.

4) Select one of the available moderation packages and options.
I already use two different moderation packages on 4 different
servers and they are of widely varying quality. The trade off is
mostly quick response with poor quality through hand moderation
with good filtering.

5) The hard part - Someone donates a server with a static IP
address and runs a freeware package on it. Or someone ponies
up the cash flow for a commercial service that supplies the server
and software with support - the cost runs about a dollar a day.
If someone will step forward for this none of the other steps will
be much of a problem. I already sponsor a group so I'm tapped out
on that front.

If anyone is willing to supply a server or pay the cash, say so and
this can happen. If anyone with prior moderation experience but
not already maxxed out on moderation dutires, say so and some
of the prep work is handled.

Benefits - The folks involved would get to decide if all cross-posts
get ejected. Think how much better the noise level would be if
all of the fat acceptance traffic never arrived in the group. Little
would be lost to cross posts to the other diet support groups.
And there's a non-obvious side effect of having a moderated group -
The noise level on the non-moderated version improves. It would
do nothing to slow down the spammers or the most obvious loons
but fewer cross-posted nonsense threads would happen.

H.L wrote:
Does anyone know what it would take to make a usenet newsgroup
moderated? The amount of spam is reaching the kind of level where I
start missing legit posts. Someone should have the authority to remove
all obvious "money maker" spamming posts.

Nobody likes spammers, but moderated groups never seem to work. I read
rec.nude, and you can imagine the nutcases, religious zealots and
spammers that newsgroup attracts. We tried rec.nude.moderated, but
nobody would read or post messages to the group. Moderated groups will
die a natural death, and I am not sure what causes that to happen.

Try using a kill filter and see if that helps.

Becca

Becca wrote in message ...

Nobody likes spammers, but moderated groups never seem to work. I
read
rec.nude, and you can imagine the nutcases, religious zealots and
spammers that newsgroup attracts. We tried rec.nude.moderated, but
nobody would read or post messages to the group. Moderated groups
will
die a natural death, and I am not sure what causes that to happen.

Try using a kill filter and see if that helps.

Becca

I don't like moderated groups myself. I would sooner deal with
spammers, since it's easy enough to skip them, or as you say, killfile
them if they are huge returning nuisances.

Cheri

I never see any spam on this group. Maybe you should learn to employ
newsgroup filters?

Susan

I don't see much at all, except for all that crap from India in the
past few days, which seems to be gone now.

Cheri

I saw stuff selling Herbalife products, someone promoting an all
chocolate diet, a post called "sexy ex girlfriends" on top of all that
Indian stuff and some more just for the last few days. I see all your
points and I accept the difficulties that Doug's posts. I don't know how
to killfile people when I read the groups with Netscape. To sum things
up, I suppose that we will stay as we are, but spam is becoming a
problem in the group. I maintain that it risks blocking real posts from
being viewed.

Spam is not becoming a problem in the group, it's a problem between you
and Netscape. Click around your settings and preferences til you find
your filtering options.

Susan

It may well be a problem with a group. People without your knowledge of
filtering may leave the group beacuse of all spam, potentially pushing
them away from low carbohydrate diets. This is against the purpose of
having the group.

Doug Freyburger writes:

"H.L" wrote:

Does anyone know what it would take to make a usenet newsgroup
moderated? The amount of spam is reaching the kind of level where I
start missing legit posts. Someone should have the authority to
remove all obvious "money maker" spamming posts.

This group has less spam than most of the other groups I'm subscribed
to, and easily better than the other alt groups. Which isn't to say
the level of spam isn't annoying. Worse than the spam, though, in my
opinion, is the cross-posted trolling.

Note well - There is zero possibility that ASDLC will ever be
converted to moderated. No UseNet server ever retroactively
moderates any group ever. It would be a new group with a new
name like misc.health.diet.low-carb.moderated. Someone
could post a pointer on a regular basis to let newbies know
where to look.

I've participated in one newsgroup (comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi)
that was self-moderated. I don't remember the particulars exactly, but
when I posted my first message to the group, it sent me an email with
instructions for verifying myself, and when I followed those
instructions, my post went through. After that, it recognized me and
accepted my messages automatically.

That seemed to be a nice compromise between zero and full
moderation. Interestingly, it appears that newsgroup converted to
moderation after already existing. That was in 1996, though, so maybe
that couldn't happen today.

After I move in April, *if* I have a static IP address, which I don't
know about yet, and *if* there's enough interest, I'll be glad to host
the necessary software to moderate a low-carb group.



--
Aaron -- 285/253/200 -- aaron.baugher.biz

On Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:25:56 +0100, "H.L" wrote:


Spam is not becoming a problem in the group, it's a problem between you
and Netscape. Click around your settings and preferences til you find
your filtering options.

Susan

It may well be a problem with a group. People without your knowledge of
filtering may leave the group beacuse of all spam, potentially pushing
them away from low carbohydrate diets. This is against the purpose of
having the group.

If they have that little knowledge of Usenet, a moderated group isn't
going to help them.


--
BlueBrooke
254/225/135

Aaron Baugher wrote:
Doug Freyburger writes:
"H.L" wrote:

Does anyone know what it would take to make a usenet newsgroup
moderated? The amount of spam is reaching the kind of level where I
start missing legit posts. Someone should have the authority to
remove all obvious "money maker" spamming posts.

Fortunately spam and troll are low carb.

This group has less spam than most of the other groups I'm subscribed
to, and easily better than the other alt groups. *Which isn't to say
the level of spam isn't annoying. *Worse than the spam, though, in my
opinion, is the cross-posted trolling.

One very simple rule for moderation software is to automatically
reject any cross-posted message. There are groups were the
occasional cross-posted message is good, but it's very rare on
ASDLC for any cross-post except ASDLC+ASD to be anything
but a troll message or responses by folks who don't notice the
cross-posting groups.

Note well - There is zero possibility that ASDLC will ever be
converted to moderated. *No UseNet server ever retroactively
moderates any group ever. *It would be a new group with a new
name like misc.health.diet.low-carb.moderated. *Someone
could post a pointer on a regular basis to let newbies know
where to look.

I've participated in one newsgroup (comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi)
that was self-moderated. *I don't remember the particulars exactly, but
when I posted my first message to the group, it sent me an email with
instructions for verifying myself, and when I followed those
instructions, my post went through. *After that, it recognized me and
accepted my messages automatically. *

Here's the problem I encountered with that in the diccussion of
the moderated group I worked on - This will ensure that noone with
an invalid e-mail address can ever post to the group. There are a
lot of folks who believe that posting with a valid e-mail address
invites spam. It's not true when actually measuring spam received
by an actively posting account like mine and an account that's
never posted to UseNet, but user posting habits are based on
beliefs so hard data like that is immaterial. I ended up not willing
to drop all posters with invalid addresses.

That seemed to be a nice compromise between zero and full
moderation. *Interestingly, it appears that newsgroup converted to
moderation after already existing. *That was in 1996, though, so maybe
that couldn't happen today.

Right. I think that was the second newsgroup ever to be
retroactively moderated. The mess that resulted was enough
that several of the largest NSP/ISPs siad they'd never try it
a third time.

After I move in April, *if* I have a static IP address, which I don't
know about yet, and *if* there's enough interest, I'll be glad to host
the necessary software to moderate a low-carb group.

Feel free to e-mail me about the topic. My address is valid.

On Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:41:22 -0500, BlueBrooke .@. wrote:

On Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:25:56 +0100, "H.L" wrote:


Spam is not becoming a problem in the group, it's a problem between you
and Netscape. Click around your settings and preferences til you find
your filtering options.

Susan

It may well be a problem with a group. People without your knowledge of
filtering may leave the group beacuse of all spam, potentially pushing
them away from low carbohydrate diets. This is against the purpose of
having the group.

If they have that little knowledge of Usenet, a moderated group isn't
going to help them.



Totally disagree. I have a hard time avoiding spam in this group, and I'm
well versed with my particular news reader. Also, with filtering, it's
easy to filter out too much stuff.

--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/