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The auto-moderation concept -- what is an auto-moderator?
As many regular readers of the many Usenet newsgroups are no doubt aware,
many newsgroups suffer from large-scale abuse -- mindless cross-postings
of material appropriate elsewhere, if at all; repeated and egregious
violations of netiquette, etc., make life hell for many sincere readers of
those newsgroups. It is seen that such repeated transgressions are usually
committed by a relatively small number of people who form perhaps a very
few percent of the strength of the whole virtual community. However, they
have a nuisance value out of proportion to their numerical strength, and
because they insist on behaving like vagrants in what is essentially an
un-policed community, they are all the more difficult to put up with.
In any "real" society, the very small number of people who insist on not
following rules that are followed by agreement, would be locked up where
they could do no harm to others or to themselves, but such is not possible
on the Internet. One solution, favored by the likes of Sen. Exon, is to
bring "real" law-enforcement to the virtual community. This solution,
however, is unacceptable to most of the members of the Internet, since it
is obvious to the many of us who have been on it for some time, that it
has its own unique structure and culture, and is not amenable to the same
sort of governance as the real world outside, or at least, that any
policing that is done, must be done from within the Internet itself, not
from outside it.
Therefore, we propose an alternative solution -- why not make it so hard
for the rump elements on the 'Net to carry out their moronic miscreancies,
so that external policing is not needed at all, or at least, very little
of it is?
At this time, neither we nor anyone else we know, can guarantee if this
will work, either, but we think it's worth a shot, simply because the
other way isn't, and _something's_ gotta work, for God's sake. And of
course, just 'cuz.
Therefore, we present the auto-moderator, a program bot that moderates
Usenet newsgroups by not allowing certain types of postings thru, but
allows everything else in. In the spirit of the First Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution, it does not scan for language use or content; it gives
options for removing cross-postings (most important, in our opinion),
"shouting" articles (POSTINGS THAT USE UPPERCASE LETTERS ONLY), excessive
quoting (articles that, say, quote eighty lines of prose and say "I agree"
at the bottom), etc. In future, the auto-moderator will also incorporate a
feature that allows the human(s) running it to set which, or how many,
newsgroups it allows people to cross-post to, but don't expect that in a
hurry. We're sick of all cross-postings, and we'd like to see it stop all
cross-postings sent to it, for a while.
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Have a nice weekend!
Regards,
Suresh.