At the moment, you need
- a secure telnet connection (ssh or Kerberos) to mit.edu; anything
under about 200 ms round-trip is fine. People in the Boston area can
use MIT's dialup instead.
- working knowledge of Unix
- working knowledge of emacs (not strictly necessary, but helpful)
- willingness to learn the moderation rules, conventions, and
supporting software
- preferably 5 hours per week, on average, but at least one or two
- about 10 hours at the start, in 2- to 3-hour chunks, for tutorial
sessions
- openmindedness, dedication, responsibility, tact, attention to
detail, etc.
Danny added:
> Or even relax the requirements. Requiring telnet access within a hop or
> two of MIT is pretty restrictive. Perhaps there are other technologies
> or procedures that would work just as well.
I'm ~16 hops from mit.edu, with a round-trip time (ping -s) of
30-100 ms, which is entirely sufficient.
We're certainly not wedded to the current procedures, but with so few
moderators there hasn't been much opportunity to consider
alternatives, much less to implement and test them. We have had one
or two ideas which could be implemented by non-moderators as
single-time projects, but even those are still preliminary.
I don't have much experience with other moderated groups, but as I
understand it news.answers works rather differently from most of them.
If anyone's interested, I'd be glad to give a summary of what
moderation currently entails and open the floor for thoughts about how
to streamline it.
- Pam