Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdahl!rtech!llama!daveb
From: daveb@llama.rtech.UUCP (It takes a clear mind to make it)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Monitoring site output (formerly portal bashing)
Message-ID: <2134@rtech.UUCP>
Date: 2 Jun 88 04:59:59 GMT
Sender: news@rtech.UUCP
Reply-To: daveb@rtech.UUCP (It takes a clear mind to make it)
Organization: Relational Technology, Inc. Alameda, CA
Lines: 25

There is discussion of site responsibility for postings, particularly
from commercial USENET service providers like Portal and the Well.  Many
people would agree that these sites have a greater moral obligation to
the net because of the perceived lack of skill/knowledge of their user
base.

One way to handle this would be to have a news administartion option
that in effect moderated all outgoing articles from a site.  That is,
the site news administator would be required to read and approve an
outgoing article before it was spooled offsite.  Yes, this would
increase the administative burden, and slow the propagation marginally.
But there sure seems to be a growing feeling that something should be
done.

I imagine this could be done as a shell wrapper to inews, substituting a
"local" distribution for the user's choice.  Given a choice, I'd prefer
that it *not* be done as a compile time CENSOR_OUTGOING option.

Discussion?

-dB



{amdahl, cpsc6a, mtxinu, sun, hoptoad}!rtech!daveb daveb@rtech.uucp