> although auto-moderation will completely eliminate cross-posting,
> it cannot prevent a handful of inspired activists from hijacking
> the group for their own agendas. anyone who is committed to the
> destruction of sci.* groups, can easily continue what they are
> doing today. isn't it very easy to write a "shell-script" which will
> keep posting junk to scit?
Thanks Prasad for your comments. But when we implement auto moderation,
even if the cross posters use a shell script to post their articles
separately, the important thing to remember is that the follow-ups to
these articles don't land up in all the newsgroups, thus saving SCITizens
from a considerable amount of unsolicited noise. Don't forget cross-posting
begets cross posting.
As you may have observed, a cross-posted thread is alive on SCIT
for long time, because all the follow-ups to this cross-posted article
land again in SCIT also. (The nature of these cross-posted articles is
usually so inflammatory that they quickly attracts many resposes). Thus,
going for automoderation saves a lot of noisy follow-ups and can
significantly improves SCIT. What do say ?
In fact, the auto moderation software can be tweaked a little bit
if necessary, to recognize the cross posted articles smartly, even
if the cross-posters use a shell scripts achieve their agendas of
cross-posting. Many newsgroups like soc.religion.unitarian-univ and
soc.religion.vaishnava have already implemented the auto moderation
scheme and it appears to be working pretty reliably for them in
eliminating the cross-posts.
Any solution requiring a regular attention of people to filter the
articles, I believe, cannot be a long term solution. I think that it
is usually difficult to maintain the enthusiasm and team-spirit for
a long time. If we have a facility to automate a process, I think we
had better give it a shot.
Regards,
Suresh.