[SpamCop-List] Re: News Admin: Newsgroup Charter?

[News Admin]

I'll be happy to post the charter or whatever at whatever interval you guys
think is right.

I'll be honest. I don't think it will make a bit of difference. Most of the
questions that are asked over and over come from the web form. I've given my
opinion before that I hate the web form, but I suppose it helps some people.
I see it as a group of people in a room having a conversation. Every once in
a while, a loudspeaker in the corner blares out someone's question and their
phone number. They have no idea what anyone else in the room has been
talking about or anything, they're standing at a microphone somewhere else.
This disrupts the room and it forces someone to actually call the guy up if
he wants his question answered.

Anyway, those guys will never see the charter because it's just taped to the
wall, inside the room. The web form for asking questions is already at the
bottom of a page with several other ways to get information. People
apparently aren't using those. I don't expect they would read 100 lines of
newsgroup charter, either.

The bottom line is I expect 95% of the people would be bothered by it more
than helped. The other 5% would maybe read it, maybe not. And the other 10%
that aren't even "in the room" wouldn't read it at all.

Now, maybe that's not a good enough reason not to do it, so like I said,
I'll post it. I don't have time to write it right now, though. If you guys
want to come up with something, go ahead and work on it here and I'll run
with what you come up with.

Alternatively (or in addition) what else can you come up with to make the
system better? Note, I don't have a lot of time for writing open source
software, so please don't make suggestions like: write a web-based
discussion board that mirrors the newsgroup. If you want to point me toward
a software package that works well out of the box, that's great. It needs to
mirror a newsgroup, though, not just be a bulletin board. We did the UBB
thing a long time ago and we're not going back to that. A web-based mirror
that's better than the archives, though, might allow non-news people to
actually participate instead of just yelling into the microphone.

I also saw a suggestion for moderating the web form. Maybe not a bad idea,
but there's a bunch of questions that come through there every day. I would
be up for moderating the web form with the following conditions:
- This would seriously delay posting, for hours or even occasionally days,
for items coming in through the web form. I can't lose sleep, skip meetings,
whatever to answer questions coming in through there.
- I can't spend time answering questions. Basically, I'm not going to be the
answer guy. Messages would get one of three dispositions. 1. Rejected
outright. 2. Answered with a 2-line max answer. 3. Passed through. That
means that everyone coming to complain about their FFA page being reported
or whatever would be passed right on through to the newsgroup like they are
now. I think you'd find that very few messages actually don't make it to the
news server. The hahaha messages would get intercepted. Posting
full copies of spam would get intercepted. Obvious ranting trolls would get
intercepted. Everything else makes it through. Are there enough of those to
justify the extra work? I'm not sure.

Any other ideas?

Jeff