home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Internet Tools (InfoMagic)
/
Internet Tools.iso
/
news
/
moderating
/
multimod.shar.Z
/
multimod.shar
/
README
< prev
Wrap
Text File
|
1994-07-21
|
4KB
|
69 lines
Subject: Re: Moderator Handbook Request
To: Kent_Landfield@sterling.com (Kent Landfield)
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 94 12:45:34 MDT
From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
No problem with releasing or mentioning the software, but it should be
pointed out that it is really of limited usefulness. I mention this only
because I wrote this software quickly and dirtily to do something that
I needed to do at the time. It was never really designed to be widely
used; for that it might need some work. And, I have been contacted a
couple of times by people who wanted to use it for things way beyond what
it was designed to do. So let me first be sure you are clear on what it
does and does not do.
Its only function is to divide up the load of moderating a group.
It is designed to be called from a sendmail aliases file, i.e. it is expecting
a submission to forward to appear on the standard input. It reads a file of
moderator addresses, one per line, which is supplied as an argument. It
selects one at random and forwards the message on. It doesn't do this
in a particularly robust way. In particular, the envelope sender is
daemon@forwarding.site, so that some moderator's mailers end up replying
back to me instead of to the original submitter of the article. It also
has the ability to send the message to ALL the moderators in the file;
this is useful for implementing the -request administrative alias.
It also accepts a -c flag to send a copy to an address designated on
the command line (i.e. in the aliases file). This is useful for archiving
postings. This is ALL it does. It does not ensure that exactly the same
number of postings are sent to each moderator. It does not remember who
got the last one and rotate moderators, it simply uses the random()
call to select one randomly each time independently. It does not
guarantee that the headers received by the moderator will be suitable
for posting without modification. It does not keep track of which postings
went to which moderator. It does not, by itself, do any moderating;
all it does is forward messages. It only works on sites that run
sendmail. It's lousy C code. There are probably better ways to
do what this does. It doesn't have any documentation other than some
brief comments about usage within the source code. Etc.
Now that you've heard all that, if you are still interested you can
have the code for your FTP site and you can mention it in your book.
There is one disclaimer you should probably include, though. This is
USENET. A person running this software is likely to eventually be
accused of wanting to "control" a newsgroup by determining who will
moderate it, and effectively I do have that power for the groups that I
forward through here. Only once was it a problem, when there was a
major dispute and flame war came up between the moderators of
soc.religion.islam and I was caught in the middle, each side insisting
that I use my power to determine who receives articles for posting to
enforce their point of view. It got really ugly, and although the
moderatorship of the group has been completely reorganized, it isn't
completely over yet. I still occasionally get mail from one of the old
moderators complaining about what the new moderators are doing. They do
not seem to understand that I don't actually read the group myself and
could really care less about what gets posted there and don't really
want to know. Anyone who decides to allow a group to be forwarded
through their machine to multiple moderators had better be prepared for
something like this. I now have a set of policies that I use for
removing or adding moderators that I require all moderators of groups
forwarded through here to agree to (it basically requires all current
moderators to agree unanimously before a new moderator will be added, or
an old one removed against his/her will).
--Greg
P.S. For the record, the USENET groups currently being forwarded through
this site via the software in question are soc.feminism, sci.research.physics,
and soc.religion.islam