[AR] Re: Bye, everyone, I'm done with this

  • From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2020 21:49:16 -0400 (EDT)

On Sat, 25 Jul 2020, Peter Fairbrother wrote:

So as to future moderation, I don't think moderation of individual posts is suitable (even though the volume is quite high ... ) - that stops the flow of conversation and thought.

Perhaps more importantly, that is a *lot* of work for the moderator, and moreover it's time-critical work. It's not that big a deal if a moderator clears the queue only once a day -- many people don't read and respond to list traffic more often than that anyway(*) -- but much more than that does get painful. So a postings moderator has to spend some time on this *every day*, and that's a sizable commitment.

There is a strong tendency for this to turn into a "whitelist" system, where the moderator maintains a list of people whose postings are almost always okay, and the moderator's software passes their stuff through without waiting. Newcomers, and people the moderator isn't sure about, can still see frustrating delays.

For a list that hasn't had a lot of trouble, I'd say it's better to rely on just being able to evict an occasional problem poster.

Henry

(* In the early days of Usenet, where most long-haul transmission was by autodialing modem and most sites limited long-distance calls to after midnight when rates were lowest, overnight turnaround worked out fine for conversation and thought. But longer delays, e.g. in posting-moderated groups with limited moderator availability, quickly became annoying. )

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