|
Top Document: Moderated Newsgroups FAQ Previous Document: Q1.1 What is a moderated newsgroup and how does it work? Next Document: Q2.1 So where did my message go? See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge
When someone tries to post a news article to a moderated group,
the local news server software automatically intercepts the post,
and e-mails it to a moderation address for processing by the moderator.
If the local news software cannot handle this, the poster could
manually e-mail the article to the moderation address directly.
Once the message reaches the moderation address, it may be handled
by a human moderator, or forwarded to one of a panel of moderators,
or filtered by some form of moderation software.
If a message is approved and posted by a moderator, it appears on the
moderator's news server and then spreads to other news servers.
Note that newsgroup moderation has some similarities to mailing
list operation - messages go to a hub, and are then redistributed.
An attempt to cross-post a message to a moderated group and to other
newsgroups will go to the moderation address for the moderated
group, and will not show up in any of the other groups on the local
server unless and until the moderator approves it as a cross-post.
An attempt to cross-post a message to more than one moderated group
will go to the moderation address for one group, in most cases,
the moderated group that appears first on the Newsgroups: line,
and will be handled further as that moderator chooses.
Each moderated newsgroup is operated independently from other
moderated newsgroups, and the procedure used by each moderator
to handle messages is probably unique to that news group,
although some techniques are in common use by many moderators.
Some common techniques include:
a moderation address different from the moderator's personal mailbox
some scripts or programs to aid in manually handling messages
some automatic ("robotic") process for handling messages
a way to distribute messages to one or more of a panel of moderators
Many of the earliest moderated newsgroups existed to distribute
free or shareware software sources, so early moderators tended to be
fairly astute about the workings of e-mail and net news, and capable
of writing their own software to support moderation.
More recently, as moderation has been adopted in less technical groups,
moderators have tended to be well aware of the topic they plan to
moderate, but less prepared to cope with the technical side of
moderation, and are likely to recruit someone to help them with
technical support of whatever scripts and programs they need.
Moderated groups frequently have names that end in .announce,
.moderated, .info, .answers, .research, or .reviews. Recently
there has been a trend to create moderated alternatives to existing
high-volume groups, so foo.bar.moderated joins an existing foo.bar.
The .announce and .answers groups tend to contain only announcements
or FAQs, while .info groups tend to have both of those.
Moderated groups in sci.* and soc.* tend to be discussion groups,
while in comp.* and rec.* they tend to be announcement groups.
Section 2 - Frequently Answered Questions
Top Document: Moderated Newsgroups FAQ Previous Document: Q1.1 What is a moderated newsgroup and how does it work? Next Document: Q2.1 So where did my message go? Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: Dmckeon@swcp.com (Denis McKeon)
Last Update November 21 2011 @ 01:00 PM
|
