Brian Edmonds <brian@gweep.bc.ca> writes:
>How is the moderation handled?
The big issue is that the news.answers moderators do a lot more than
just moderate the newsgroup. In fact, they don't do much of anything
that normal moderators do, since when they "approve" a posting, they
don't post it with the Approved header -- just tell the originator
that it's OK.
Thus it's all those other tasks that require training time.
Not surprisingly, this issue came up repeatedly on the old
faq-maintainers list, so I attach a couple of messages from one of
those exchanges. Note that the first was in response to a rather
different original message from Brian's, so please remember that the
tone was in response to someone else.
Edward Reid
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 14:20:13 -0400
To: "FAQ-Maintainers" <faq-maintainers@lists.consensus.com>
From: Edward Reid <edward@paleo.org>
Subject: Re: FAQ archives?
Please review the archives of this mailing list. You'll find that
these issues have been addressed many times, and revisiting them only
adds to the load of the moderators. They have been modernizing,
streamlining, all they can. The improvements made in the past 4-5
years are quite considerable, especially considering that they've
generally been done with only one or two already-busy people. They
cannot just add moderators untrained without risking mucking up the
works badly.
Look at faqs.org and check out how many postings are approved for
news.answers. There's no way to keep up with it manually, and changes
in the outside priorities of the moderators can have a quick and
dramatic effect on the throughput balance.
If you have strong skills in the kind of scripting applications
needed for maintaining and automating the news.answers systems and
are willing to spend time (at least tens of hours) on it, do contact
the moderators. They've automated a lot and I'm sure they want to
automate more.
If you would like to be a moderator, contact the moderators. If you
are willing to commit several hours a week for a period of several
years, I'm sure they will be very interested. Don't offer ten or
twenty hours; it will cost them more time than that to get you up to
speed. Someone willing to commit to maintaining continuity for a
period of years would, I feel sure, be very welcome.
>Another possibility would be to use a distributed "NET" approach for
>FAQ reviews. Start up a moderated news.answers.faqs4review and
>news.answers.newfaqsdebate.
You are proposing a large and entirely new mechanism. As you
correctly state, news.answers approval is based solely on form. The
moderators simply require this much time just to deal with the form.
They certainly aren't reviewing content.
>Ask this list if you need some help
They have, many times. But realize that they won't ask for an hour or
two of help -- it isn't worth their time. If you can contribute
hundreds of hours, then volunteer. Or (perhaps) tens of hours
specifically for writing scripts.
Edward Reid
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 14:39:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Alex Lamb <dalamb@cs.queensu.ca>
To: faq-maintainers@consensus.com
Subject: followup to Edward Reid's message
Edward is right -- Pam probably spent 20 hours or more training me,
in actual
sessions but also answering newbie questions, fixing mistakes I made,
etc.
One of the few short-term helps would be spam filtering improvements.
The
scripts we have help a lot, but still about half of our queue is spam
that
made it past our filters. I wouldn't want to post the spam filter too
publicly because I don't want to give the spammers any more
information about
how to bypass us, but a perl hacker who knows a lot about spam
filtering
already might be able to at least suggest some improvements once they
see the
scripts.
I suppose speeding up the rtfm CPU might also help, since it often
runs slowly
at the times I need to use it, but there seems little chance of that.
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