[PLUG] To moderate or to unmoderate

[Arun Khan]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 11:34 AM, Koustubh Sinkar  wrote:

.... snip .... entire content of Sudhanwa's OP -

> I am against removing the moderation completely. I think the moderation
> flag should be for newcomers or for the first 5 or 10 posts by any
> newcomer. Once someone has posted 5 to 10 posts while under moderation,
> then we can remove the moderation flag on her. If the list becomes
> unmoderated, I would be unsubscribing from this list.

Many list follow this policy.  However, my personal concern is that
the moderator Q (in this list) is not cleared in a timely fashion.
If you have followed some of the earlier discussions way back from
early Dec/2012, even seasoned poster's responses have been caught into
the moderator Q trap (for various reasons - please see the archives).

Thus, I see this as a problem - a new member (not necessarily
inexperienced in the mores of mailing lists culture / practices) makes
an OP or replies (with a helpful answer).  Her/his post goes into the
moderator Q and may not be approved for several days (it has happened
to several of us - please see the archives).   IMO, that is a sure
deterrent / message to the new member to go elsewhere :(    The choice
is ours - encourage new members and cajole them into following the
mailing lists guidelines or to moderate them and let their postings
sit in the queue, making them wonder "WTH!"

Thus, if moderation of new members is the popular thinking, then the
moderator pool must be expanded and each member *must commit* to
checking the Q at regular intervals and clearing/reject the postings
in less than 12 hours.  In this list, I think that has deteriorated
over the past few years and the issue has come to this head.

> How do you propose to Vote for/against a post? This is a text based mailing
> list and not some fully featured web application that has voting/liking
> facilities. Although this idea of yours can be extended to create some kind
> of mailing list protocol that can handle meta-information.

+1 I think it would be better to capture the data via a poll on the
web site rather than +1 or -1 in the mailing list.  I believe the PLUG
web site is based on a CMS platform.  A poll on the web site or Google
Forms would capture the data more succinctly.

> Ideally speaking crowd moderation is the best way to moderate public lists
> like LUG's

+100.   Many of us here are members of other mailing lists and the
information is free flow.  See Debian-general, CentOS-general, MythTV
user.   I have hardly seen any flame wars there and some occasional
spam on Debian which gets fixed by the owner (active monitoring).

> but is it feasible with just a mailing list without a lot of
> noise/metainformation (read voting) being passed, which could also
> degenerate into flame wars?

Please see above.  Also, among India based LUG mailing lists, Chennai
is the most vibrant (IMO) - no moderation, no flame wars, n00bs are
reminded how to post (!top posting etc.) the mailing list members.
Do not take my word please see the archive
<http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/>

-- Arun Khan