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From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP@mcnc.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Censorship and Moderated Newsgroups
Message-ID: <170@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 1-Aug-83 16:52:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.170
Posted: Mon Aug  1 16:52:31 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 3-Aug-83 02:58:16 EDT
References: <79@vortex.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 58

A couple of notes on moderated newsgroups:

The real issue involved with moderated newsgroups is information quality
vs speed of distribution.  (My experience with moderators agrees with
Lauren's - the moderators don't "censor" in practice.)  It is unlikely
that a moderator would go through their list of submissions more often
than once a day, so the added delay is the time for mail to get to the
moderator plus the time it waits for the moderators attention.  The
item is then distributed from a different point on the network, but a
more central point (if the moderator is well connected) and will probably
reach the net at about the same speed.  Mail can take anywhere from a few
minutes (in the case of a direct link and an autodialer) to overnight
(in the case of a polled connection) to 3 or 4 days (mail to/from Europe
seems to take this long - I haven't figured out why).  In the case of a
flakey link, it could sit in some spool directory arbitrarily long.
However, a good average figure is probably overnight.  If the moderator
times things right, and does moderation in the morning, the total added
delay would probably average one day.  (Of course, if the moderator gets
lazy or goes on vacation, it can take longer.  I've seen this happen on
the ARPANET many times.  If the moderator is a grad student, and he
suddenly gets a burst of energy and works on his thesis for 2 months,
the digest may suffer.)

By contrast, news travels at varying speeds.  Within Bell Labs, it's not
uncommon to see discussions where turnaround is a couple of hours.  I saw
one recently where the originator of the discussion posted 4 separate
articles in one day, all in response to someone elses followups to his
various articles.  This only matters to a person who checks for new news
every hour or so - I personally check it once a day.

I claim that for most informational newsgroups (e.g. net.general, net.wanted,
net.lang) an extra day of delay won't matter much.  For some newsgroups the
extra day would be fatal (e.g. net.news.config).  For discussion newsgroups
(net.flame, net.singles) such delay would be undesirable, but a moderator
is not needed or wanted.  For internal discussion newsgroups such as btl.all,
given that almost everybody in BTL has a dialer, a moderator is probably
a bad idea.  The point is that only some newsgroups want or need a moderator.

net.announce is going to be the first moderated newsgroup.  It will be an
experiment to see how the whole concept works out.  Since this will take
the place of net.general (which will continue to exist), the moderation delays
probably won't be a problem at all.

The last test message I posted to net.announce produced failure messages from
only 7 systems.  The Usenet administrators of those sites have been quite
cooperative in upgrading their news to 2.10.1 (if you're still running 2.10
you'll have the same problem), and I will try again in a couple of weeks.
Hopefully by the end of August we'll be able to start using net.announce.

There is code in 2.10 to support moderated newsgroups which have names
mod.all, all.mod.all, or all.announce.  Thus, we have a good deal of
flexibility in choosing newsgroup names for other newsgroups that wish
to be moderated.  Once we decide if this is a good idea, the next step
would be to either create (say) net.mod.misc, or else create the newsgroup
class mod.all by having all the system administrators put mod.all in their
sys file as a class they forward everywhere.

	Mark Horton