Paul W. Schleck wrote:
In .com writes:

Paul W. Schleck wrote:

I acknowledge that we have problem users, trolls, etc. on this
newsgroup. I will consult, on an ongoing basis, with newsgroup
participants for *specific* recommendations for actions, such that I am
not contributing to this problem through my inaction.

Here's an idea that I have seen work: email reflectors with a
moderator.

Anyone interested can sign up to the reflector - but they have to give
a real email address and identity to the moderator/list coordinator. No
anonymous stuff.

The moderators don't read and approve each and every email before it is
reflected. But if someone steps too far out of the reflector
guidelines, or goes too far off topic, they're warned. If they do it
too many times they are simply banned from the reflector. Which happens
very rarely.

That system works very well. Disagreements abound, yet are handled with
civility. And a lot of good information and discussion results.

The whole thing is simple and straightforward, and works for anyone who
has email.

Why all the complexity of a moderated newsgroup if it can be done by
email? What are the advantages of usenet over a reflector?

Good questions!

Some of the answers are in the article "Tragedy of the Usenet Commons":

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.r...5a58c8d3396e17

that I relayed from Telecom Digest back in 2002, and recommended as
useful reading to our proposed moderation team.

I'll take a look!

Successful mailing lists do not scale well with potentially thousands of
subscribers. The subscribe/unsubscribe burden gets to be overwhelming.
Even with automation, there's still enough people who need manual
assistance subscribing or unsubscribing. Also, the odds of tripping up
SPAM filters goes up exponentially with audience size, either from
automated mischaracterization, or misreading by human recipients.
Mailing lists with thousands of subscribers will generate hundreds of
bounces every month due to changing E-mail addresses. Large mailing
lists are also not an efficient use of Internet resources, since they
send the same message over and over and over and ...

Agreed to a point.

Part of the question is size. How many people will really read a
moderated policy group? The number of posters here has always been
pretty small, and when you eliminate the anonymous, the people using
multiple IDs and the noise, the numbers may be smaller than many
reflectors I know of.

Unsuccessful mailing lists fragment audiences into tiny pockets, as
mailing lists are not as well known or publicized as Usenet newsgroups.
As the article above notes, even a great forum may go undiscovered by a
user simply because "he or she doesn't know where to look or whom to
ask." Duplication of effort, "re-inventing the wheel," and a shallow
base of expertise then results.

Agreed to a point. But at the same time, how much use does Usenet get
anymore? For example, some time back, AOL discontinued direct access,
citing low usage.

There are arguably many more
"unsuccessful" mailing lists than successful ones because of this
specific problem. This is the case even on Yahoo Groups, with many
fragmented forums despite efforts to index groups and automate most of
the administrative burdens.

Maybe. The irony of the "information superhighway"

Some of Usenet's weaknesses are also its strengths. It has a
distributed transport scheme where every node on the network shares
communications and storage burdens. It is universally available (well,
still nearly so).

I see access going down, though. Besides AOL's discontinuance, Google
has moved it to a back page, as it were. Website-based forums like
qrz.com and eham.net seem much more active nowadays.

It is publicly archived at Google.

To the chagrin of some posters to rrap.....;-)

All forums are
indexed in a newsgroups database available at every news server. It is
a long-time, mature resource, with a strong self-governance. The
newsgroups for amateur radio on Usenet are voted into existence by user
consensus, and thus are recognized by everyone as the "official"
newsgroups. How would you convince enough users what are the "official"
replacement mailing lists?

All I'm saying is that I've seen email reflectors work well with
several hundred subscribers. How many people actually read rrap?

I would disagree that Usenet newsgroups have to be complex. For one
thing, we would propose to use Secure, Team-Based Usenet Moderation
Program (STUMP):

http://www.algebra.com/~ichudov/stump/

Looks doable. It appears to me, however, that every posting which gets
through the basic robofilters is approved by a moderator before posting
- is that true?

Which is a working, stable solution used by many other newsgroups we
would like to emulate, such as misc.kids.moderated. As with
misc.kids.moderated, most of the initial configuration work would simply
be figuring out who the white-list, black-list, and manual review
submitters would be, and it will not be necessary to read every article
submitted on an ongoing basis. As a result, we anticipate that the
workload will drop over time.

All of this will be discussed in much more detail in the upcoming RFD.

Thanks for the info!

---

And I'll repeat my other question:

If the FCC simply drops the code test, or makes it optional like Canada
did, what *other* policy topics would be on the table?

73 de Jim, N2EY

In .com writes:

Paul W. Schleck wrote:

[...]

In .com writes:
I would disagree that Usenet newsgroups have to be complex. For one
thing, we would propose to use Secure, Team-Based Usenet Moderation
Program (STUMP):

http://www.algebra.com/~ichudov/stump/

Looks doable. It appears to me, however, that every posting which gets
through the basic robofilters is approved by a moderator before posting
- is that true?

There's several modes that STUMP can operate in. It can always pass
articles to a moderator for full review. It can also operate against a
white-list of approved users and pass their articles on directly to the
newsgroup without moderator intervention. STUMP has some sanity
checking against forgeries and other inappropriate content, and this can
be reinforced with other mail-filtering front-ends such as Procmail (not
white-listing posts from known open/rogue news sites would be the main
enhancement we would add).

The misc.kids.moderated team figured that if a poster was able to submit
three unique, timely, and on-topic articles that would otherwise be
approved by the moderation team based on other factors like civil tone
and respect for others' opinions, then that person could be trusted to
be white-listed in the future. Of course, there is always the option to
yank that white-listing if there is future misbehavior. White-listed
users would have to identify with what we reasonably believe to be an
unforged "Last Name or Callsign."

Incorrigible users with demonstrated and ongoing records of simply not
being able to respect, or debate fairly with, others could easily be
locked out of the newsgroup. Their articles wouldn't even be considered
by the newsgroup, as they would be bounced back without being viewed by
a moderator. Such permanent blacklisting should only be done in
exceptionally grave cases. We're contemplating starting everyone out
with a "clean" record, then applying a sliding scale of warnings and
temporary bans up to that ultimate penalty based on future behavior.
Specifics will be in the RFD.

And of course, there would be the gray areas such as submitters who can
contribute positively but need every article scrutinized for lapses, new
submitters without an established three-article track record for
white-listing, articles coming through open news servers such as Google
Groups or aioe.org where the source cannot be reasonably authenticated
by automated means, as well as other things that may require moderator
review such as SPAM that got through other filters, off-topic
submissions, etc. These will be directed to a queue for prompt review
by a member of the moderation team. Over time, the gray area should get
smaller and smaller, and thus our workload should reduce.

Which is a working, stable solution used by many other newsgroups we
would like to emulate, such as misc.kids.moderated. As with
misc.kids.moderated, most of the initial configuration work would simply
be figuring out who the white-list, black-list, and manual review
submitters would be, and it will not be necessary to read every article
submitted on an ongoing basis. As a result, we anticipate that the
workload will drop over time.

All of this will be discussed in much more detail in the upcoming RFD.

Thanks for the info!

---

And I'll repeat my other question:

If the FCC simply drops the code test, or makes it optional like Canada
did, what *other* policy topics would be on the table?

73 Dee Jim, N2EE

Probably some of things I mentioned in a previous reply to Len that
rebutted his assertion that the "sole purpose" of the newsgroup was to
debate Morse code testing:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.r...5697020?lnk=st

In addition to the examples I mentioned, probably also the following:

- Where to fold in wider-band digital modes.

- Ongoing FCC attempts at mode-agnostic bandplanning, such as that
put forward in RM 11306.

- How to do this without overruning the amateur radio bands with closed,
proprietary systems being used as telecommunications substitutes, such
as ocean sailors' use of WinLink 2000.

--
73, Paul W. Schleck, K3FU

http://www.novia.net/~pschleck/
Finger for PGP Public Key

Share with us Paul, are you a far left liberal Democrat,
because they too demand total control of what news is
published?

Paul W. Schleck wrote:
In .com writes:

Paul W. Schleck wrote:

[...]

In .com writes:
I would disagree that Usenet newsgroups have to be complex. For one
thing, we would propose to use Secure, Team-Based Usenet Moderation
Program (STUMP):

http://www.algebra.com/~ichudov/stump/

Looks doable. It appears to me, however, that every posting which gets
through the basic robofilters is approved by a moderator before posting
- is that true?

There's several modes that STUMP can operate in. It can always pass
articles to a moderator for full review. It can also operate against a
white-list of approved users and pass their articles on directly to the
newsgroup without moderator intervention. STUMP has some sanity
checking against forgeries and other inappropriate content, and this can
be reinforced with other mail-filtering front-ends such as Procmail (not
white-listing posts from known open/rogue news sites would be the main
enhancement we would add).

OK so far - all ways that reduce the number of posts a moderator has to
read.

The misc.kids.moderated team figured that if a poster was able to submit
three unique, timely, and on-topic articles that would otherwise be
approved by the moderation team based on other factors like civil tone
and respect for others' opinions, then that person could be trusted to
be white-listed in the future. Of course, there is always the option to
yank that white-listing if there is future misbehavior. White-listed
users would have to identify with what we reasonably believe to be an
unforged "Last Name or Callsign."

Sounds like a lot of rules but OK.

Incorrigible users with demonstrated and ongoing records of simply not
being able to respect, or debate fairly with, others could easily be
locked out of the newsgroup. Their articles wouldn't even be considered
by the newsgroup, as they would be bounced back without being viewed by
a moderator. Such permanent blacklisting should only be done in
exceptionally grave cases. We're contemplating starting everyone out
with a "clean" record, then applying a sliding scale of warnings and
temporary bans up to that ultimate penalty based on future behavior.
Specifics will be in the RFD.

And of course, there would be the gray areas such as submitters who can
contribute positively but need every article scrutinized for lapses, new
submitters without an established three-article track record for
white-listing, articles coming through open news servers such as Google
Groups or aioe.org where the source cannot be reasonably authenticated
by automated means, as well as other things that may require moderator
review such as SPAM that got through other filters, off-topic
submissions, etc. These will be directed to a queue for prompt review
by a member of the moderation team. Over time, the gray area should get
smaller and smaller, and thus our workload should reduce.

Which is a working, stable solution used by many other newsgroups we
would like to emulate, such as misc.kids.moderated. As with
misc.kids.moderated, most of the initial configuration work would simply
be figuring out who the white-list, black-list, and manual review
submitters would be, and it will not be necessary to read every article
submitted on an ongoing basis. As a result, we anticipate that the
workload will drop over time.

All of this will be discussed in much more detail in the upcoming RFD.

It seems to me that such a complex system would be needed for groups
with lots of different contributors. Does rrap really have that many
people reading it?

Thanks for the info!

---

And I'll repeat my other question:

If the FCC simply drops the code test, or makes it optional like Canada
did, what *other* policy topics would be on the table?

Probably some of things I mentioned in a previous reply to Len that
rebutted his assertion that the "sole purpose" of the newsgroup was to
debate Morse code testing:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.r...5697020?lnk=st

Regardless of the original purpose of rrap, its charter has broadened
to meet the name "policy"

In addition to the examples I mentioned, probably also the following:

- Where to fold in wider-band digital modes.

- Ongoing FCC attempts at mode-agnostic bandplanning, such as that
put forward in RM 11306.

- How to do this without overruning the amateur radio bands with closed,
proprietary systems being used as telecommunications substitutes, such
as ocean sailors' use of WinLink 2000.

Seems the right direction to me.

It also seems to me that such a moderated group could exist in parallel
with rrap as we know it today. Let those who do not want moderation
have their unmoderated forum, and those who can live with the
moderation rules have theirs.

73 de Jim, N2EY