Moderate this group? (was: SPAMMINGS: ARGH!)

Yes, the level of spam is amazing.  Also, since I've been posting, my
email address is out and I'm getting junk like "Hot $ex $ite" showing up
IN MY EMAIL.  AAAAAaaaaaa!

I'm really irritated, its enough to make me want a moderated newsgroup. 
I've changed my reply address to: ...@math.fsu.edu--remove-to-reply  
but I'm just too late.

What is everyone's thoughts on a moderated newsgroup?  I'd love to see
one, as long as s/he is extremely liberal... I love the little flame
wars and the "rat's ass" and all the off-color stuff that flies around
in here and wouldn't want any censorship on anything even remotely
related to this group, but dang, lets get the commercial stuff outta
here!  ("Hot $ex $ite" must go... "Hot ASCII Sex" must stay!)

I understand there used to be a rec.ascii-art which was moderated...
what happened to it?  Can it be reborn?  What's the process?  And who
would be dedicated enough to review everything every day?  Could it be
moderated by machine as Shimrod post implies?

LETS FIGHT!  LETS TAKE BACK THIS GROUP!


Michael

-- 
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| \_|_\    |  \/  |--| '(| =|  |  \| |/o \ " /|_/ O | O )      ()  o
|_|_| |    |_\__/_|__|_|_|__|  |_|\__|_/\_|_|___|__/|_\_\   o_/||\/ 
 \|__\|       Michael Naylor, www.math.fsu.edu/~mnaylor       _/\_

Michael Naylor wrote:
> 
> What is everyone's thoughts on a moderated newsgroup?  I'd love to see
> one, as long as s/he is extremely liberal... I love the little flame
> wars and the "rat's ass" and all the off-color stuff that flies around
> in here and wouldn't want any censorship on anything even remotely
> related to this group, but dang, lets get the commercial stuff outta
> here!  ("Hot $ex $ite" must go... "Hot ASCII Sex" must stay!)

I agree -- apart from "[..] as long as s/he is [..]", which suggest that
ONE person should moderate everything. I've tried, it's really a lot of
work, at least if you do it manually with Netscape 3.01 like me. I've
cancelled over 30 commercial posts just today.

As I wrote earlier, I think only obvious spam posts should be removed,
and anything just SLIGHTLY on-topic should be left alone, and I have
never and will never remove anything except for posts like "Free Psychic
readings", "Hot Sex Passwords", "Cheap CD-R's" etc.

As long as we agree only cancelling obvious spam postings, I see no
problem letting all regular alt.ascii-art users be moderators. If people
just cancel spam as they see it, the problem would virtually dissapear.

Lars.

Lars Hansen wrote:
> 
> > Are you saying that when you cancel a spam message, then no one else
> > sees it?  I just don't think that's how it works... am I missing
> > something?
> 
> I think it is ...
> 
> I am posting this reply three times, and will cancel two of them. If
> you see more than one, please tell me!

Oh by the way, to my understanding, a few servers don't support
cancelling, so there is a SLIGHT chance you can see all three posts
anyway :)

Lars.

You can't have it both ways. I'm a firm believer in non-moderated
newsgroups. As much as I hate the "Nasty Cheerleaders" yada yada yada
posts, I want ALL on-topic posts to stay, and once you start moderating a
group, all garuntees of that are null-and-void. The US just shot down the
Communications decency act for a reason, if we want total freedom in our
posts, we need to put up with the crap that clogs the bandwidth, it's just
a simple fact. Best thing to do is go through the headers of any spam,
send them to the postmaster, and let them take care of it. Failing that,
just whack the "next" key on your browser and ignore the junk.

    -Nana

On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Michael Naylor wrote:

> What is everyone's thoughts on a moderated newsgroup?  I'd love to see
> one, as long as s/he is extremely liberal... I love the little flame
> wars and the "rat's ass" and all the off-color stuff that flies around
> in here and wouldn't want any censorship on anything even remotely
> related to this group, but dang, lets get the commercial stuff outta
> here!  ("Hot $ex $ite" must go... "Hot ASCII Sex" must stay!)

Nana wrote:
> 
> You can't have it both ways. I'm a firm believer in non-moderated
> newsgroups. As much as I hate the "Nasty Cheerleaders" yada yada yada
> posts, I want ALL on-topic posts to stay, and once you start
> moderating a group, all garuntees of that are null-and-void.

Until now, noone have been talking about cancelling anything but obvious
spam, like "Free Psychics" or "Cheap CD-R's" etc. That way, everything
on-topic (and more) will stay safely in the NG. As long as we all agree
on only cancelling the obvious off-topic, there should be no need to
worry.

> just whack the "next" key on your browser and ignore the junk.

Today some guy accidently (?) spammed this NG with about 70 copies of
the same post (He even crossposted it to several NG's where it
definitely was off-topic!). That means you would have to whack your
"Next" key 70 times. Of course, excluding the daily crap posts, which I
count to about 23 today.
I don't know about you, but I don't feel like having to skip 93 crap
posts and read about 15 on-topic.

Just my 2 cents....

Lars.

On Sat, 12 Jul 1997 17:01:16 -0600, Nana <tss...@freenet.calgary.ab.ca>
wrote:

>Communications decency act for a reason, if we want total freedom in our
>posts, we need to put up with the crap that clogs the bandwidth, it's just
>a simple fact. Best thing to do is go through the headers of any spam,
>send them to the postmaster, and let them take care of it. Failing that,

And it will fail most of the time (in fact, lately, all of the time) because
the headers are doctored.

>just whack the "next" key on your browser and ignore the junk.

No, not good enough. When the big boys start playing because we at least appear
to have decided that it is acceptable, you will then have a newsgroup of 25 on
topic messages and 500 junk spams. There is simply no such thing as total
freedom. We all must be bound by laws and by an inner sense of right and wrong.
When somebody refuses to abide by the rules, we censure them in a court of law.
When they refuse to act decently, even when it is within the 'law' so to speak,
it has to be our right to censure them socially. If that means wiping their
lack of decency off the system, then so be it.

Unfortunately, as much as I would like to agree with you, it is as inevitable
as history, that ignoring the evil does NOT make it go away. It merely allows
it to fester and grow.

I'm all for a moderated newsgroup. Though I would like to see some sort of
accountability if possible (maybe a posted list of deleted subject lines from
time to time or some such thing) because I too fear exactly what you fear. The
only difference between us is that you feel that ignoring it will not have a
deleterious effect, and I am absolutely convinced that it will.

Alan

My real address is alanp @ netcom.ca (without spaces)
but I'm sick of email spam.

Kevin Kreamer wrote:

> We need to change that perception.  I wonder what would happen if we
> forwarded every spam that we received either on Usenet or in email to
> all of our national officials (since I'm in the US, I'd forward my
> messages to the White House and to Congress.  The Supreme Court might be

There's a great idea!  Anyone know where we can send it?

Lars showed me how to cancel to spam, but it really is a lot of work, and akin to 
putting on a helmet because someone is hitting you on the head with a hammer.  What 
really troubles me is that I feel so POWERLESS to do anything... I want to do 
something, even if it's just to DO SOMETHING.

I think Kevin's idea about forwarding spam to inconvenience our legislators might 
help... if you find some email addresses, let us know!

Michael

spa...@mymail.com wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 13 Jul 1997 21:12:50 +0200, Veronica Karlsson
> <e93...@nospam.sm.luth.se> wrote:
> 
> >spa...@mymail.com wrote:
> 
> >> time to time or some such thing) because I too fear exactly what you fear. The
> >> only difference between us is that you feel that ignoring it will not have a
> >> deleterious effect, and I am absolutely convinced that it will.
> >
> >There already is such a group [that should be] running in parallell with
> >this one. It is called rec.arts.ascii, but unfortunately it has been
> >dead for about half a year now - why not blow some new life into that
> >one?
> 
> Just so I don't misunderstand, are you suggesting this group be ditched

Definitely not (even on a fast day the other group was much slower than
this one).

[ 8< ]

-- 
:)
Veronica Karlsson
( e93...@sm.luth.se  http://www.ludd.luth.se/~vk/ )
( llizard's fanclub:  http://www.ludd.luth.se/~vk/llpages )