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From: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: Call for Discussion: Moderation of news.admin
Message-ID: <4968@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 27 Sep 88 21:59:35 GMT
References:  <3147@utastro.UUCP> <699@mace.cc.purdue.edu> <1581NMBCU@CUNYVM> <828@acer.stl.stc.co.uk>
Sender: news@cs.purdue.EDU
Reply-To: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
Lines: 39

In article <828@acer.stl.stc.co.uk> dww@acer.UUCP (David Wright) writes:
>In article <1581NMBCU@CUNYVM> NMBCU@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes:
># ... I'm only in favor of it being moderated, if Gene Spafford moderates ...
>Yes, I'd vote for that!   How about it Gene?

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I'm not sure this is the
best idea, for a couple of reasons:

1) Many people, especially some of those who feel the need to complain
about the status quo, feel that I'm part of the problem.  Thus, they
would not like to see me moderate.  
2) I can't devote much time to it.  I'm heavily involved in the
kinds of professorial duties one might expect of a junior faculty member
trying to establish good credentials for tenure.  The Usenet is
kind of low on my list, in that sense.  Combined with a heavy travel
schedule, it really isn't practical to have me as moderator.
3) I don't read much of the Usenet anymore.  In fact, most of the
old-line backbone/senior admins don't read the net much either.
There is too much noise, too much petty bickering, and too little
value anymore for me to bother reading more than about 6 groups.
Ideally, if you are going to have someone moderate a group about
administering news, you'd like someone who tends to follow
some larger subset of the newsgroups.

Therein lies an interesting catch-22.  You want someone with some
restraint and experience with the network.  However, I can't
think of anyone in that category  who still reads any significant
number of groups in Usenet!

The flap over portal was short-lived.  Admittedly, it never should
have happened in the first place.  Unfortunately, the same process
is at work in most of the netgroups.  Perhaps news.admin should be
left as is -- a reflection of the net as a whole.

-- 
Gene Spafford
NSF/Purdue/U of Florida  Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-2004
Internet:  spaf@cs.purdue.edu	uucp:	...!{decwrl,gatech,ucbvax}!purdue!spaf