"'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.