Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!proxftl!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: How can a moderator take a vacation? (Re: comp.sources.unix)
Message-ID: <224@twwells.uucp>
Date: 28 Nov 88 19:19:54 GMT
References: <184@twwells.uucp> <7681@well.UUCP> <200@twwells.uucp> <13186@ncoast.UUCP>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale
Lines: 31
Summary:
Expires:
Sender:
Followup-To:
Distribution:
Keywords:

In article <13186@ncoast.UUCP> allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
: The main drawback, again, is all the submissions that land in my mailbox
: despite repeated pleas to not do that.

Oh dear. If you haven't been able to solve this problem with appeals
to reason, I don't imagine that I'll have any better luck.

If it gets to be a real problem, I might make it a practice to bounce
stuff coming to my personal account. It wouldn't be nice, but it
would be a solution.

: Perhaps a solution-- Have *all* the moderated newsgroups be housed on UUNET,
: with special accounts for them.  The moderator(s) do all their work on UUNET
: -- and if the primary moderator disappears, the backup moderator (who has
: been logging in daily, or weekly, or whatever to check on the newsgroup's
: status) will pick up the slack until the primary announces his return via
: mail on UUNET.

This is a good idea, and of course, UUNET, while the obvious choice,
doesn't have to be the only system where moderators work from. Any
reasonably stable system where this would be allowed would do.

And the backup moderator doesn't have to log on till a problem
develops; the moderator's account could have a cron job which checks
to see if the account has been used in a week or whatever.  If it
hasn't, the job could send a message to the backup moderator and post
a message to the newsgroup.

---
Bill
{uunet|novavax}!proxftl!twwells!bill