Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/03/05/03:56:11
On 4 Mar 1997, Jesse Bennett wrote:
> sword. It will reduce the email traffic but list subscribers who are
> interested in these (or similar) topics will be excluded from the
> discussions altogether.
DJ, can you please explain what would retro-moderation mean for
subscribers to the mailing list? Thanks.
> I feel obligated to reiterate my concerns about the R-M approach that
> has been proposed. This seems a very slippery slope, allowing
> postings to be anonymously canceled with no accountability. There are
> some technical issues here as well. What is to stop a disgruntled
> individual from canceling legitimate posts as well (or worse, running
> a CancelBot which targets his "enemies")?
I think you are pushing this issue way too far. The authority to
cancel messages is not given to everyone: the news group has to come
up with a (hopefully small) number of individuals who are *trusted* by
the group to exercise this authority only in those cases where the
postings don't belong to the group. Thus the risk of *arbitrary*
cancellation on *personal* or other irrelevant grounds does not exist;
making that risk a real concern could IMHO dupe people into thinking
that this is a moot issue. Trust is the basis for any DJGPP-related
activity. (As a matter of fact, most human activities in a society
involves certain degree of trust; you won't be able to make any
significant progress in almost any field without trusting that certain
``rules of the game'' are mostly kept by others.)
My real concern is how well *trustworthy* and *well-meaning*
individuals can indeed classify the borderline postings in a way that
doesn't prevent useful information from getting to people who might
find it helpful.
> Independently of any moderation disscussions I think it is worthwhile
> to review the group charter periodically. What should be considered
> on-topic for the group? For example, none of the following are djgpp
> specific - should the group charter ban these discussions?
>
> * Discussions about gcc in general (language extensions,
> optimizations, assembly language programming, etc.).
>
> * Discussions about C programming methods. Tips, tricks, etc.
>
> * Discussions about porting code using gcc but not djgpp specifically.
> For example, I might be interested in porting an application using
> Linux. Since the code should compile with little or no
> modification under djgpp it seems likely that there might be some
> interest in the djgpp community.
These are all those ``borderline'' cases that worry me. My best
answer to the above question is that discussions on these subjects are
*somewhat* relevant to DJGPP, therefore they should *not* be banned.
However, it is true that more often than not, these threads gradually
become less and less relevant to DJGPP as they evolve. It would be
wonderful if people had a degree of self-restraint to stop pursuing
the issue (publicly; private email is OK) after a certain point. But
it's naive to expect something like that in a real world. Even
reviewing the group charter won't help here, I think (for example, I
estimate that about 30-40% of the messages are covered by the FAQ, but
people still post them, although the charter says they shouldn't).
The *real* issue here is not whether a bunch of criminals will take
control of this news group's traffic, the issue is this: how much are
we annoyed by the noise that we get on an unmoderated group, and how
much can we trust our trustees to let them cancel and/or re-route
some of the messages. That is the issue that DJ was talking about;
FWIW, I agree that it *should* be raised and discussed by everybody
who cares to make their views public.
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