Pitfalls of Newsgroup Moderation
"'enry" wrote in message
... Pitfalls of Newsgroup Moderation (or Things You Wished You'd Thought Of Before You Started) http://www.landfield.com/usenet/moderators/handbook/ Maintained by Russ Allbery The link didn't work for me. (Follow ups to other groups removed.) I moderated a Yahoo Group once. Never again. The problem is where to draw the line. Any moderator would stop cross-posting, spam, idiotic and offensive postings. But the real problem is the grey areas. In a group like URG where a lot of the participants have known each other, perhaps for many years, and perhaps also in person, it is normal for off-topic exchanges and general chit-chat between regulars. You just can't expect participants to restrict every sentence to Gardening. There are also likely to be disagreements between the participants which may get quite heated. Even personality clashes. There is a blurred line between heated disagreements and personal criticism. Drawing the line is a nightmare. Before you know where you are, the moderator is deemed to be on the "side" of one poster over another for deleting a posting that he deems to have crossed the line but for not deleting a posting considered to be just on the other side of the line. Nightmare. Participants can then feel "picked on" when some of their posts are deleted and no longer participate and the group can slide into disuse. The more rigid the moderation the more quickly the group declines. |
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