On 8 May, 17:11, Marc wrote:
Doug wrote:
On 8 May, 14:05, wrote:
On 8 May, 13:22, "Jackbike" me@somewhere wrote:

I, for one would like my cycling newsgroup back please. Count me as
interested.
Yea, it would be good to talk about bikes on a cycling newsgroup for
once!!

I don't want to be a wet blanket but my experience has been that
USENET, like the world at large, has become infested and dominated by
motorists who, now that they are under extreme pressure from the
environmental lobby, are having to try to justify their chosen mode of
transport. Part of their justification seems to be trying to rubbish
cleaner forms of transport such as cycling while embracing polluting
forms of transport such as flying.

My experience is that the only "motorists" that come here to justify
anything are here answering you. If you dissapeared so would they.

I think many people (not Ian Jackson, although I still think it offers
benefits over just having a separate moderated group) are
misunderstanding my proposal. I am not proposing to moderate urc. I
would leave it exactly as it is now. Anyone posting to urc would have
their messages appear on urc as now, and anyone replying to posts on
urc would be able to just as now. What i am proposing is to have a new
news group which *automatically* gets copies of the posts which appear
on urc and filters them so that the new news group only displays a
subset of the messages which are on urc. The new news group can also
be posted to directly but these messages would a) go through the
filtering mechanism before being made publicly available on the new
group
b) be posted to urc.

So at all times the new group would have a filtered (read moderated)
subset of the messages on urc.

This should not lead to fragmentation of the cycling community since
urc readers would see *all* the messages that readers of the new group
see. Readers of the new group would see a selected subset. If they get
concerned that they might be missing something they can always read
urc.

My hope would be that at least one forum would be free (perhaps not
completely at all times but 99% say) of the kind of pointless time
wasting off-putting stuff that currently makes up, and might well
still continue to make up the content of urc. Furthermore should
something slip through into the new group it could be killed off by
the moderator(s), have new stuff added to kill files, disallowed
posters etc. As I said, if anyone decides they don't like this they
can always go back to urc without losing anything since anything on
the new group would be there too.

I agree that (as far as i know) no-one has done anything like this
before. In fact if the software could be set up to do this I think
quite a number of newsgroups might benefit from it.

Rudi