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