Has anyone though of starting a UK DIY moderated group?
I run several Yahoo Groups in my other 'life' as a magician and the flame wars aren't anything like the Dr Drivel ones we get here.
Obviously the magicians groups are restricted membership for security - we don't want people knowing how stuff is done, but its dead easy for a moderator (or moderators) to stamp out silly flame wars that just waste space and make threads unreadable. or to ban the members that start them.
The only public domain magicians group 'alt.magic' has literally died due to one troll who just snipes at everyone.
Yahoo Groups demands registration with Yahoo and using their shitey web interface. Yahoo Groups are useless for off-line reading, and aren't publically archived. I'm not sure what the copyright implications of using Yahoo Groups are - do they get ownership of posts?
Moderated newsgroups are possible - uk.legal.moderated has recently been created. They require the use of a moderation bot running on a server somewhere, and of course they require a process for appointing moderators.
uklm does moderate on content (some moderated newsgroups only moderate to remove spam, personals and non-plain-text) and in a moderated-on-content group someone has to decide what is and isn't acceptable. One issue on uklm is whether moderators (who exercise editorial control) might be liable for defamation if they pass a post subsequently held to be defamatory.
The problem with Drivel is that most of his posts (apart from the 'snip drivel' ones) are "on topic" for the group, even if useless or worse than useless. I think peer review is better than, effectively, censorship.
The easiest way is either ignore Drivel completely (killfile him in your newsreader) or just skip past threads that turn into name-calling.
If you could use your professional talents to turn Drivel into a white rabbit or saw him in half or something, I wouldn't deny it would be something of a public service.
changing the setup of this group gets suggested on a regular basis. But uk.d-i-y works very well. We're a group of diyers and builders, we seem to fend them off well enough. Just go look at some of the threads.
Anyway, fools have as much right to use this place as anyone else. Maybe we stop them killing someone, when they occasionally listen.
1 or 2 are best plonked, or add something to the old dr. Evil drivel thread.
It is something that crops up every so often, as does splitting the group into several speciality areas. Both usually generate a number of posts but eventually fail because the regular posters do not wish to have to monitor more than one group to offer advice.
But Yahoo groups are essentially mail based. The beauty of this one is anyone can post here - and that's what gets some of the most interesting discussions going.
That's fine for a 'boys' club.
Several have tried here and failed. It only really happens on low traffic groups.
If the 'flames' truly upset you simply killfile the participants and or thread.
Yes, and there's nothing stopping you from doing so. Personally, I'll be staying here. I'm not interested in news articles appearing as emails or via web pages.
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