Version: $Id: interest,v 1.13 1994/09/28 00:13:09 pschleck Exp tkoenig $
======== Document introduction
If you are reading this document, you have already expressed interest in
becoming a *.answers moderator. This document is only intended to be an
overview of *.answers moderation, and does not contain the nitty-gritty
details of how to perform particular tasks. We assume some familiarity
with *.answers (in particular, information covered by the posting with
the Subject line "Introduction to the *.answers newsgroups").
======== What are some advantages of being a *.answers moderator?
Well, there's the fame and fortune associated with being the moderator
of a Usenet newsgroup. Well, fame, maybe. Well, grief, maybe. Anyway, if
you're a masochist and/or a workaholic, this is just the thing for you.
There's also the very real but intangible benefits that comes from
knowing you help to provide one of the more successful services on the
Internet, contrary to beliefs that nobody on the net could possibly be
altruistic enough to put in so much volunteer time.
Every so often, moderators of *.answers are offered complimentary copies
of books or CD-ROM's (usually introductions to the Internet) which
include some of the informational postings made possible by their work
(e.g., List of Periodically Informational Postings) by publishers in
exchange for the right to reproduce the material.
Lastly, a side benefit is that since the newsgroup's administration is
done on MIT's Athena computing environment, you'll get an Athena account
if you become a moderator. But if you want to be a moderator because of
this and not because you really want to help moderator *.answers, then
you shouldn't be a moderator.
======== What are some disadvantages of being a *.answers moderator?
It can be a lot of work. (However, the more moderators [up to some limit
of diminishing returns, of course], the easier the work load for any
individual moderator.)
There is a non-trivial learning curve to learn how to perform the
various tasks and use the software tools for *.answers moderation.
(However, the how-to-moderate guide has been recently rewritten, and an
FAQ for the *.answers moderators themselves has been started. :)
Some people think it's OK to shit on moderators.
======== What duties does a *.answers moderator have?
A list of duties from a draft of the how-to-moderate document follows:
* Examining submissions to determine if they are appropriate for
*.answers, and rejecting inappropriate submissions.
* For postings that are appropriate but not formatted correctly for
*.answers, sending back a letter explaining what needs to be corrected
before the postings can be accepted.
* Dealing with the necessary administrivia when you approve a new
posting, or when you approve changes to an existing posting.
(Includes processing faq-maintainers* administrative requests.)
* Dealing with unapproved or badly formatted postings in *.answers.
* Performing routine maintenance on the FAQ archive on rtfm.mit.edu.
* Keeping the "List of Periodic Informational Postings" up-to-date.
* Performing routine maintenance on the *.answers correspondence
archives and on the archives of the faq-maintainers and
faq-maintainers-announce mailing lists.
* Maintaining the *.answers FAQ server, which is used by FAQ
maintainers to post their FAQs if they are having trouble
cross-posting to *.answers directly.
How much time this can all take depends on many factors. There are
weeks when dozens of submissions appear and weeks when hundreds of
submissions appear. When all moderation duties fell upon a single
moderator, the load was quite heavy. As of the writing of this
document there are now six members of the *.answers moderation team.
Depending on how busy other aspects of our lives are, and how much
experience each of us has, we put in widely varying amounts of time
working on *.answers moderation tasks. Because of all these factors,
we can't easily tell you how much time you would "have" to dedicate to
*.answers if you were to become a moderator (and we are all, after
all, volunteers). However, perhaps an useful measure is that if an
additional moderator were to join the team and put in a steady five
hours per week, that would be a welcome and not unnoticeable
contribution to the teamwork.
======== How does someone become a *.answers moderator?
If you've read this document up to this section and are still
interested, please indicate your interest to the existing moderators by
sending email to the address news-answers-request@mit.edu, and we will
follow up on your interest.
We will have to decide if you have enough experience to be a moderator,
provide more detailed information, and if all is agreeable on both
sides, get you started. During your first month or so as a moderator,
we'll make an effort to keep abreast of what you are doing to make sure
you're doing stuff right.
======== What network access does somebody need to become a *.answers
moderator?
Most of the work is done interactively, on machines at MIT. You will
need Internet access, with a reasonably fast link to MIT. To try
this out, you can ping mit.edu; if your turnaround time is much larger
than 200 msec, working will be almost impossible.
-- The *.answers moderation team (news-answers-request@mit.edu)pshuang@mit.edu (Ping Huang) jik@cam.ov.com (Jonathan I. Kamens) ig25@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (Thomas Koenig) buglady@bronze.lcs.mit.edu (Aliza R. Panitz)
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