Practical experiences of demoderating a moderated group?

[Rayner Lucas]

Every now and then someone brings up the idea of converting a moderated
group to unmoderated. Someone else then replies that this must never be
done: some news servers would fail to honour the requisite control
message, leaving the group in an inconsistent state and leading to
unwanted effects such as some servers rejecting valid posts or messages
being directed to non-existent moderators. Fair enough.

However, in the past, changing a group's moderation status has been
considered a viable option, and occasionally such changes have actually
been implemented.

In October 2009, Moderator Vacancy Investigations posted by the Big-8
Management Board started to include the boilerplate text:

"This investigation will attempt to verify the reasons for non-function,
and may result in the removal of the group or the selection and instal-
lation of a new moderator. In practice, the Big-8 Management Board
considers the third alternative--changing the status of the group from
moderated to unmoderated--as likely to cause more harm than good."[1]

However, the moderator vacancy announcements/investigations immediately
preceding this (in April 2009) all retain demoderation as an option.
These were for the groups:
news.admin.announce [2]
comp.lang.asm.x86 [3]
news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins [4]
news.admin.net-abuse.policy [4]
news.admin.net-abuse.sightings [4]

And the charter of news.admin.moderation (Mar 2007) states that suitable
topics for discussion include: "whether it would be appropriate to
propose demoderating a specific group (the actual proposal, if made,
would be to the appropriate configuration newsgroup)"[5]

Some searching of the ISC archives[6] shows that there were several
cases of a moderated group being changed to unmoderated prior to this,
including:
comp.society (June 2004)
comp.soft-sys.business.sap (November 2004)
soc.culture.galiza (June 2006)

If any of the groups that were demoderated from 2004-2006 had become
irretrievably broken, it seems likely that the MVI template would have
been changed immediately to remove demoderation as an option, and the
charter for news.admin.moderation would not have included it as a
suitable topic for discussion.

Did something happen in 2009 to cause a change of mind? Or was "likely
to cause more harm than good" intended specifically in the context of
the comp.ai.jair.* groups, which were announcement groups relating to
the Journal of AI Research, and it's been copied into subsequent MVIs
ever since?

It is also interesting to note that RFC 5537 (unlike its predecessor,
RFC 1036) explicitly allows for a change of moderation status:

"The newgroup control message requests that the specified group be
created or, if already existing, that its moderation status or
description be changed."[7]

RFC 5537 was published in November 2009, not long after the MVI that had
declared such changes impractical.

So, the big question is, does anyone remember how well demoderating a
moderated group *actually worked in practice*? Were there major
problems, or did it all get worked out in some reasonable timeframe? And
would any attempt nowadays be more likely to succeed now that it's
explicitly permitted by the standard and Usenet itself is smaller, or
less likely because nobody's had to deal with such a thing in the Big 8
for years?

Regards,
Rayner

[1] "Moderator Vacancy Investigation: comp.ai.jair.*", 25th October 2009
https://groups.google.com/g/news.groups.proposals/c/1Lzg6vn6NaM

[2] "Moderator Vacancy Announcement: news.admin.announce", 18th April
2009
https://groups.google.com/g/news.groups.proposals/c/2Cld9IlyqB8

[3] "Moderator Vacancy Announcement/Investigation: comp.lang.asm.x86",
19th April 2009
https://groups.google.com/g/news.groups.proposals/c/EGrYSTxDe1M

[4] "Moderator Vacancy Announcement: news.admin.net-abuse.*", 27th April
2009
https://groups.google.com/g/news.groups.proposals/c/0r_-JEbQ5Ws

[5] "RESULT: news.admin.moderation will be created", 31st March 2007
https://groups.google.com/g/news.groups.proposals/c/o1gC1lsYin0

[6] https://ftp.isc.org/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/

[7] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5537.html#section-5.2.1

[Paul W. Schleck]

In <***@news.eternal-september.org> Rayner Lucas <***@magic-cookie.co.ukNOSPAMPLEASE> writes:

[...]

Post by Rayner Lucas
So, the big question is, does anyone remember how well demoderating a
moderated group *actually worked in practice*? Were there major
problems, or did it all get worked out in some reasonable timeframe? And
would any attempt nowadays be more likely to succeed now that it's
explicitly permitted by the standard and Usenet itself is smaller, or
less likely because nobody's had to deal with such a thing in the Big 8
for years?

[...]


Before we consider if demoderation would be technically possible, maybe
we should contemplate whether or not there are valid use-cases where
demoderation would result in a better outcome than the status-quo.

I can think of several good examples where converting a moderated
newsgroup to unmoderated would not be a good idea:

- Where there are a pair of newsgroups for the same topic, one
moderated, one unmoderated, and the moderated one ends in
".moderated". For example, misc.legal and misc.legal.moderated.

- Where there is already an unmoderated newsgroup for the same topic,
but under alt.*. For example, rec.radio.broadcasting and
alt.radio.broadcasting.

- Any newsgroup under the soc.religion.* hierarchy. All such
newsgroups, with the exception of soc.religion.quaker, were converted
to moderated years ago due the nature of the topic and the high
likelihood of flame wars and abuse.

- When the newsgroup is unlikely to generate any on-topic article
traffic, even if effectively unmoderated by setting submissions to
auto-approved robomoderation. For example,
misc.writing.screenplays.moderated, which degraded into solely about a
dozen automatically-approved SPAM articles a week at the end.

Proponents of demoderation in the last case are effectively arguing that
the solution to a house that couldn't find an owner would be to unlock
the doors and hope that someone takes ownership of it, never mind that
there are similar houses next to it that got trashed, burned by fires
set by transients and arsonists, and had all of their appliances, pipes,
and wiring ripped out. This would therefore be an unimaginative, even
lazy, solution that will not end well. The proper solution in this case
is to find a new owner (moderator), or tear down the house (remove the
newsgroup).

These examples appear to represent all of the likely present, and
future, newsgroup hierarchy administration cases before the Big-8
Management Board for Usenet.

--
Paul W. Schleck
***@panix.com