Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site cbosgd.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!gummo!whuxlb!pyuxll!eisx!npoiv!npois!hogpc!houxm!hocda!spanky!burl!duke!mcnc!mark@cbosgd.UUCP 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