Time to go moderated?

No chance!

Spam is easy to spot and ignore.

Oh - that's what you said :-)

Just shows how wise one of us is :-)

Mary

COuld do, the current batch all appears to be from gmail/googlegroups users.

Owain

Agreed. I moderate several Yahoo Groups and I take the view that the group belongs to the members not the moderator. Membership is limited so we don't have any spam and abusive posts are stopped immediately.

It works.

Thing is, to go moderated on Usenet we'd need to change the charter.

As we don't have a charter ...

Owain

X-No-Archive: Yes

The Natural Philosopher wrote: re moderation

a noticeable and sometimes useful minority of what gets posted here could be regarded as legally liable. We'd lose something if it were censored. Exactly what depends on POV, whether its good advice or rebound discussions of why not to do it.

|The Medway Handyman wrote: |> The Natural Philosopher wrote: |>>If its limited to simply removing posts that are pure abuse, or have |>>absolutely no relevance, or legally liable wordage...then its fine. |> Agreed. I moderate several Yahoo Groups and I take the view that the group |> belongs to the members not the moderator. Membership is limited so we don't |> have any spam and abusive posts are stopped immediately. |> It works. | |Thing is, to go moderated on Usenet we'd need to change the charter. | |As we don't have a charter ...

Actually it is realistically impossible on usenet to change from an unmoderated group to a moderated group because it requires *all* newsservers to change their settings. This never happens.

All that is possible is to set up RFD uk.d-i-y.moderated, wait some months and rmgroup uk.d-i-y.

Ask on uk.net.news.config They will explain it better than I

FWIW it would be possible to set up say uk,d-i-y.building uk.d-i-y.plumbing uk.d-i-y.electrical etc. etc. but IMO this would be a bad idea because the present uk.d-i-y is about the right size for a newsgroup.

|X-No-Archive: Yes | |The Natural Philosopher wrote: re moderation | |> If its limited to simply removing posts that are pure abuse, or have |> absolutely no relevance, or legally liable wordage...then its fine. | |a noticeable and sometimes useful minority of what gets posted here |could be regarded as legally liable. We'd lose something if it were |censored. Exactly what depends on POV, whether its good advice or |rebound discussions of why not to do it.

It would be likely that a moderator would not allow anything which they

|This, the most useful usenet group on the internet, is now being totally |spoilt by spam. Is it time to have a uk.d-i-y.moderated, and all move |there?

Just thought of a problem with Moderation of a DIY group. The Moderators who allow something to be posted, by poster "A", could be responsible for other persons posts, which could cause loss, injury or death to a reader. AFAIK this has not been tested in court. IANAL. I would not risk it myself, without insurance which I would not pay for.

Remember that ?AOL? was recently taken to court by someone who was defamed/flamed on a newsgroup.

Ask on uk.net.news.config where you will get half a dozen conflicting opinions.

On a usenet unmoderated ng only the poster "A" would be liable, and he/she would have the defence that poster "B" said that "poster "A" was a complete idiot and had no idea about he/she was talking about, and the correct way to do it would be ..."

Yes. Assuming it was still an open group like this - rather than one where you had to join and be approved, as some Yahoo etc ones, - the moderator

All I can say is that moderated web based bulletin boards exist and work well.

These are NOT usenet.

In many specialist areas they have completely wiped out the equivalent Usenet, newsgroup simply because they offer a higher signal to noise ratio...

IF you are discussing DIY, there is little need of flame wars abuse attacks and so on. Or questionable material.

Slagging off manufacturers products is of course the one area in which the law might apply..but if the data actually represents the truth, its a hard case to prove.

The only group I can think of that has undegone this process was the creation of uk.legal.moderated. This has been a vast improvement on uk.legal but I don't think that uk.d-i-y needs to go down that route. As others have said there is actually very little actual spam here and although discussions occaisionally may have a tendency to veer a little OT (*) it's easy to use the ignore function.

Cheers

Mark

(*) Ok perhaps it would nore accurate to say that discussions rarely stay on topic but that being said some of the most intresting stuff comes out of these.

|> |The Medway Handyman wrote: |> |> The Natural Philosopher wrote: |> |>>If its limited to simply removing posts that are pure abuse, or have |> |>>absolutely no relevance, or legally liable wordage...then its fine. |> |> Agreed. I moderate several Yahoo Groups and I take the view that the |group |> |> belongs to the members not the moderator. Membership is limited so we |don't |> |> have any spam and abusive posts are stopped immediately. |> |> It works. |> | |> |Thing is, to go moderated on Usenet we'd need to change the charter. |> | |> |As we don't have a charter ... |>

|> Actually it is realistically impossible on usenet to change from an |> unmoderated group to a moderated group because it requires *all* |> newsservers to change their settings. This never happens. |>

|> All that is possible is to set up RFD uk.d-i-y.moderated, wait some months |> and rmgroup uk.d-i-y. |>

|> Ask on uk.net.news.config They will explain it better than I | | |The only group I can think of that has undegone this process was the |creation of uk.legal.moderated.

The left uk.legal running so that there are now two legal groups. I saw a post somewhere that uk.legal.moderated was not as successful as expected.

They never are on Usenet because either the moderation is not properly done, or it's filtered with the views of the moderators or people don't like the constriction

I just looked at a recently downloaded groups index. Out of 52651 only 174 have the word "moderated" in them.

That really says it all.

I have occasionally posted to one or other or both of the above; my experience has been that invariably the .moderated message has never got posted it, and for no obvious reason (ie totally uncontentious etc). Furthemore, of those posts which have made it, I've had far more response to those posted in uk.legal.

If it ain't broke (and it ain't) don't fix it!

David

The message from Richard Downing contains these words:

Then unspoil it by using a spamfilter. Mostly I only ever see spam when some burk replies to it.

Not in this case, but often what happens is they ask a question, get a couple of decent answers then the thread drifts into something else. They consider it 'their' thread and it's been polluted. But this drift can be what keeps the interest of those who answer the questions and makes it an interesting group to read.

My spamfilter works on my Inbox but I don't know if it removes spam from ngs. Mind you, it depends what you call 'spam' :-)

I reckon I've already killfiled those I think are sending spam or who are offensive so there wouldn't be much for it to do.

Mary

The message from "Mary Fisher" contains these words:

ZIMACS can apply filters to mail, news or both.

But how does it recognise spam?

One man's spam is another man's meat :-)