Larc said:
| Just in case I'm missing something...
|
| Is there an easy way to tell whether a UseNet group is moderated?
|
| Kind of annoying when posting if the post doesn't show up immediately and
| suspecting that it's because the group is moderated.
|
| Thanks.
If a post of mine didn't show up, I'd first suspect my ISP or some other level of
routing. With USENET clearly on its deathbed, I doubt there are many actively
moderated groups anymore.
Larc
I see about 130+ moderated newsgroups from the Albasani NNTP server.
They don't carry all groups so someone, say, using Giganews might count
more.
There have never been a lot of moderated newsgroups. Requires someone
to volunteer their time to authenticate all the submissions. Does that
sound like a job you would like to do and for free and at all times
throughout the day? Also, moderated groups are the antithesis of Usenet
which was born and designed to be a worldwide mesh network of servers
that had no control over the content they carried (think of Tor today).
Seems many of the moderated newsgroups were originally mailing lists
where moderation was employed by whomever was administering the mailing
list. They decided to hook into Usenet but still wanted their moderated
mailing list. Moderated newsgroups have an e-mail backside and why
there's the delay. Nowadays the mailing list seems integrated with an
NNTP server they're using but e-mail notification to the admin of the
group is still there. Besides having to waiting until a real person
decides what to do about your post, remember that e-mail is NOT a
guaranteed delivery service. This isn't the only example of hooking
into Usenet to accomodate a different paradigm for communication. Many
web-based forums run NNTP-to-HTTP proxies so they can leech, er, borrow
the content of Usenet to pretend they have a larger community or provide
a web-based UI to boobs that can't figure out a couple of config
parameters in setting up an NNTP client.
<rant>
That's why it is so comical when posters use the X-No-Archive header or
1st-line body header trying to hide their posts (and punch holes in
threads) after some period of time over which they have no control. The
web-based archives don't give a gnat's fart about this header. Google
will expire an article marked with this header after 6 days (so such a
poster effective punches holes in threads to which they reply).
Clients, web based forums leeching from Usenet, and archives other than
Google Groups (e.g., Howard Knight) don't honor that header. The poster
trying to hide his post after a week (and obviously who considers their
post as insignificant so they should have never posted) is a boob
because their article is still archived somewhere. They think their
article will expire in a week. They have no control over the expiration
since it is a request to the server or to whomever retrieves a copy of
their article. Okay, I comply with their "X-No-Archive: Yes" request
and my expiration is zero; i.e., I immediately expire their posts. They
think they're moderating the lifetime of the post. They're clueless.
</rant>
Back to moderated forums, think of a convention center announcing "free
speech forums" but after entering you find about 5% of the cubicles
aren't free speech at all. Yes, we all know the argument that freedom
does not preclude responsibility but Usenet is not a political
organization. It is an anarchy so moderation is out of place. If users
want a regulated or moderated venue to communication with other users
then they should go to web-based forums (and suffer the flattened
threads versus the hierarchical ones available in Usenet to determine
who said what to whom).
Perhaps before the Usenet reorganization, the mod.* groups were like
having private forums: only those invited could play. It kept out
everyone else. Not just the bad posters but all posters except for
those enlisted in the elite group. Apparently they wanted to rely on
the worldwide mesh network of NNTP server with its redundancy rather
than any one of them having to setup their own private NNTP server and
rely on login credentials to keep out the riff raff. Anyone can operate
their own NNTP server, like news.grc.com or news.mozilla.org, and not
peer it to Usenet to keep the community small and focused. They can
even require login credentials to operate a private non-peered server
versus a public non-peered server. But those require running your own
NNTP server. A moderated newsgroup requests someone else to have their
server do the notification.
Filtering is how you modify the Usenet so you see what you want to see.
Alas, many Usenetizens are too lazy or ignorant to define their own
filters. Users wanting a comfy cozy environment that has someone else
do the filtering should go to web-based forums where moderation is the
[expected] norm. Those with thin-skinned egos shouldn't be in Usenet.
There have been so few moderated newsgroups in the past that I doubt the
percentage has changed much over the years. Many web-based forums
popped up to provide a more cozy and protected environment for those too
weak to endure the anarchy of Usenet.
You won't be happy with the limited number of moderated newsgroups
unless you only participate in very few topics and there happen to be
moderated groups that cover those. Then there's the delay to get your
submission accepted and then when it finally appears. Usenet is not
designed to provide immediate response, like a chat room, so the added
delay may tax your patience.
