In article ,
Rudi wrote:
I've been giving quite a bit of thought to what has been going on
in urc. [...]

I quite agree. My killfile is now taking out around 80% of the
messages. And I'm a hardened campaigning type.

I have long experience with USENET both on technical and political
level so I hope I can provide some useful information about the
various options.

B) An alternative response is to just start up an alternative
moderated news-group. This however runs the risk of splitting the
cycling community into those on one group and those on another

This is the conventional approach in this situation. I don't think
there would be too much difficulty getting people to move over to the
new group. We should have a regular FAQ posting inviting people to
the moderated group.

A) One response would be to moderate urc. Although this would probably
sort the problem for the majority there are disadvantages to this:

As well as the political problems you identify, which are severe,
changing an unmoderated group to a moderated one is also very
difficult for technical reasons. I think we should rule this out.

So is there some way of leaving urc unmoderated while still somehow
enabling people who want to to essentially see a moderated version?

I don't think this is worth the hassle. It's possible I think in
principle but there are going to be difficulties. I don't think
anyone has done anything like this before and it would be
controversial. One more conventional option would be to have the
moderation system always crosspost its output to the unmoderated
group, and to have it post _rejected_ articles only to the unmoderated
group. That would have much the same effect.

But really I think one of the things we want to avoid is the kind of
fragmentation of discussions that results from a filtering approach.


So in summary I think we should create uk.rec.cycling.moderated.

I think the real difficulty is the moderation policy. To avoid
endless and useless arguing about whether someone is or is not an
obnoxious and disruptive troll, and/or whether some article is or is
not new and useful, it is necessary to have a moderation policy which
is objective.

We don't want to exclude all messages which criticise someone's
cycling. Do we even want to exclude messages which mention h*lm*ts ?

Given the obsession that has been generated in some of the trolls we
can expect any policy we write which depends only on the content to be
subverted. Consider a piece of trollery starting like this:

From: Sock Puppet

I was cycling to work the other day when I thought I would try
not using the cycle track alongside the road, and instead use
the `primary position' in the road. I found that I held up
the traffic very much and although the drivers all kept their
distance I felt I was probably being inconsiderate. Why do
so many posters to this group advocate cycling in this way ?

(which I've made up; I'm sure there must be real examples and even if
there aren't now, there would be). How do we distinguish it from a
sensible and respectfully phrased question like this:

Subject: Passing cyclists two-up on narrow roads

I recently passed two cyclists riding two abreast on a B-road. I'm
interested in opinions on whether my approach to passing was okay from a
cyclist's perspective.

It was on a country road that's about wide enough for two cars doing around
40mph or so, going in opposite directions, to pass each other without
[...]

?


I think things we can clearly exclude include:

* Postings which are abusive or insulting.

* Postings which substantially repeat something which has already
been said in the thread, even if by someone else.

But I don't think that's sufficient.

Ideas, that seem to be perhaps unsatisfactory but are worth
brainstorming, include:

* Require posters (of some kinds of articles?) to give and use
their real name (eg, to avoid nym-shifting).

* More severe restrictions on articles about controversial topics.
(We could make a list of the subjects, or have the moderators
maintain a list.)

* Maintain a list of approved posters of some kind and impose
draconian restrictions even as to subject matter of un-approved
posters.

Eg:

* Prohibit postings about `road politics' from any previously-unknown
poster.

* Prohibit postings about `road poltiics' from pseudonymous posters.

* Reject postings which seem to miss or dodge the point of the
article they're following up to.

* Reject postings from posters who cherry-pick the articles to reply
to, to ones they have an answer for.

* Reject postings from posters who have frequently posted things
which can be objectively determined to be wrong.

PS On a technical note I believe there are Python libraries that make
dealing with NNTP protocols easy, and there are automated moderator
systems like this one

There is no technical difficulty with running a moderated group. I'd
be happy to host and run moderation software on my own colo machine.

--
Ian Jackson personal email:
These opinions are my own. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ijackson/
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