>From: Matthew Hambley <snowyowl@therealm.freeserve.co.uk>
>
>Given all this discussion concerning the lack of moderators I, for one,
>would be interested to find out what is involved in being a moderator.
I'm assuming you're referring to *.answers moderation, which is a bit
different from most newsgroups' moderation needs. Here are some excerpts
from "So you're interested in helping moderate *.answers...".
======== 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. 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.
======== 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 may be difficult.
======== What software packages would it be helpful for me to know or
learn?
As long as you have a basic working knowledge of UNIX and at least one
text editor, you can pick up most of the other tools as you need them.
Being comfortable with emacs is a big help. Familiarity with (or
willingness to learn) the MH mail system, RCS, AFS, perl, procmail,
make, rkive, and post_faq are all handy, in decreasing order of
importance.
- Pam Greene
former *.answers moderator
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