In article , Dkat wrote:
Is there no one this can be reported to?
Only the ISP of the offending poster, as identified by the
message's headers.

Can the room be turned into a moderated room?

It's not a "room", it's a USENET newsgroup (regardless of the
terminology that your news-reader uses). The system was designed for
unmoderated interchange of information and opinion, primarily in an
academic environment and the basic protocols simply did not include any
mention of "moderation" at all. Moderation has been added since, but a
newsgroup needs to be initially set up as being moderated to ensure that
all the properly and improperly configured USENET hosts "gets the
message".
The protocols for setting up a new newsgroup in one of the "big
eight" hierarchies of USENET (comp.*, misc.*, net.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*,
soc.*, talk.*) are well established. In this case you'd probably be
looking to set up "rec.ponds.moderated" or something similar. You'll need
to write a charter (describing the aims of the group, what's on-topic,
off-topic), post calls for votes at certain intervals in (one of the
news.* groups, I can't remember which ; news.* is for discussion of
administration of the USENET structure), and then, if the votes turn out
in favour then your moderators will be able issue the control messages to
get news administrators around the world to accept and relay messages
directed to your newsgroup.
BTW, who's going to do the moderating, and what rules are you going
to have to settle disputes about the moderator's decisions? These
questions absolutely must be addressed, and answered, before the votes
could even be considered for being called. (BTW, a number of vote counters
who are completely independent of the group proposed must be found ; there
are procedures for this too).

Typically, setting up a big-8 newsgroup takes several attempts
before it's successful. Six months to a year, I recall as being the
typical time to set it up.


In contrast, to set up a group in the alt.* hierarchy you just need
to know how to post control messages to a news server, have permission to
do it from the server's owner, and then persuade other news
administrators, individually, to accept and relay messages for that group.
Some people will, some people won't ; there is no governance of alt.*
apart from the arbitrary whim of news administrators and the willingness
of people to pay for "content".

In short, no you can't turn rec.ponds into a moderated newsgroup,
but you could set up a moderated group such as rec.ponds.moderated, if you
wanted to spend the time, or alt.rec.ponds (which may or may not be
carried by news providers at their discretion) if you wanted a result this
week.

Looking through my ISP's list of carried groups, I see
alt.arthritis.spondy.risg.info, which is moderated ; alt.garden.pond.chat
, which is not moderated ; alt.support.arthritis.risg-spondy.info , which
is unmoderated ; alt.support.arthritis.spondyloarthro.moderated which is
not moderated ; and rec.ponds (plus 3 others in alt.* , one in misc.*, and
4 others in other hierarchies which are of non-global distribution such as
fr.rec.jeux.corresPONDance). I know nothing about the contents of any of
these, but my guess is that recently someone has been trying to set up a
group about a joint disease, but has been getting it wrong, repeatedly.
That's typical of alt.* .


Hope this helps. I'm sure it's not the answer you want, but it's
reasonably accurate. (Some years ago I was looking at setting up a
newsgroup for my area ; we decided against it and set up a mailing list
instead, which worked more-or-less, but gives one a lot more control than
a newsgroup. It's correspondingly less accessible though.)

--
Aidan Karley,
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: +57°10' , -02°09' (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
Written at Thu, 06 Oct 2005 09:24 +0100