moderation of alt.sources vs. automated harangues
Jef Poskanzer
pokey at well.UUCP
Tue Oct 17 06:59:01 AEST 1989
Making alt.sources moderated would be unacceptable. If anyone tries it
I will immediately newgroup yet another sources group, since quick
turnaround and reliability against single-point hardware, software, and
moderator failures are desirable features.
I also agree that there is a problem with leaving alt.sources
unmoderated. Sending mail to people who post non-source articles works
great for them. No repeat offenders until this Dunc asshole. But the
net has an infinite supply of bozos in addition to the fairly small
supply of Duncs.
I suggest that alt.sources be moderated, but the moderator's address
should be an automatic reply script that mails something like this back
to the sender:
You have posted the appended article to alt.sources, which is a
moderated newsgroup. However, it's not *really* moderated, it's
more like *self* moderated. You see, back when it was unmoderated,
many people would post non-source articles, either accidentally
or through ignorance. This was very annoying to those who archive
the group. So finally someone suggested making it moderated, but
having the moderator's address be an automatic reply script that
sends this message.
There are plenty of other newsgroups for non-source postings about
sources: alt.sources.d, comp.sources.d, comp.sources.bugs, comp.bugs.*.
If your message is not source code of some kind, please post it in
one of these other groups.
If, on the other hand, your posting is source code, GREAT!! The net
needs more source code. To post it for real, all you have to do
is "forge" a moderator's approval. Here's what you do: save the
message into a file; edit it, and anywhere in the headers area add
this line:
Approved: by me
Then feed it to inews like this:
inews -h < file
And that's all. If you have any trouble with this procedure, feel
free to mail the article to <insert human secondary moderator's
address>, and it will be posted within a few days just like with
a real moderated newsgroup.
I volunteer to set up this reply script. Improvements to the wording
are welcome.
---
Jef
Jef Poskanzer pokey at well.sf.ca.us {ucbvax, apple, hplabs}!well!pokey
"Never do anything if you can find someone to do it better - except for the
things you want to do most of all." -- Thomas James
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