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Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2024 08:13:28 CST
From: Jon Ribbens <jon+usenet@unequivocal.eu>
Newsgroups: news.groups.proposals
Subject: Re: Moderator Vacancy Investigation: comp.os.plan9
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID: <slrnvi19ol.372.jon+usenet@raven.unequivocal.eu>
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On 2024-10-29, Anthony <a@9srv.net> wrote:
> Tristan Miller <tmiller@big-8.org> wrote:
>> Dear Steve,
>> 
>> On 2024-10-28 22:51, Steve Bonine wrote:
>>> I am sincerely curious.
>>> 
>>> The moderator announced his retirement in July 2013.
>>> 
>>> According that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, the last release of 
>>> plan9 was in early 2015.
>>> 
>>> With dozens of dead newsgroups, why this one?  There is no hint in the 
>>> MVI that there is any interest in this OS, much less in a newsgroup.
>> 
>> The MVI was prompted by one of the directors of the Plan 9 Foundation, 
>> who had written to the Board with the intention of reviving the 
>> newsgroup, perhaps via a bidirectional gateway to the 9fans mailing 
>> list.  He suggested converting the group to unmoderated, but as this is 
>> a rather experimental solution, we proposed running an MVI, at least as 
>> a first step, to see if the group could remain moderated.
>> 
>> Yes, perhaps we should have mentioned this in the MVI.  I have written 
>> to the director in question to let him know about the MVI so that he can 
>> weigh in.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Tristan
>
> Hi, I am the director in question. :-)
>
> Steve, that does not give a adequate picture of the activity around Plan 9.
> In the last few years, the Foundation has been formed, recently got its
> 501(c)(3) status, and has hosted two instances of the International
> Workshop on Plan 9, after a hiatus of (from memory) eight years. There are
> two active public forks/distributions, as well as a number of smaller or
> one off projects using it as a base.
>
> My conversation with the Big 8 board stalled mostly because I was
> indecisive about what to do about the bridge to our old mailing list. Since
> then, we have been moving farther and farther away from it, and it seems
> pretty certain re-creating the bridge would be a bad idea at this point.
>
> I don’t know what the right answer is about moderation. I read several
> unmoderated news groups which are great, but I’ve also had to abandon a
> couple which had turned into trash fires. Simply naming a new moderator is
> certainly the simplest path. I am interested, but also don’t wanna be a
> single point of failure. I’ve asked on her mailing list if anybody’s
> willing to work with me on it. I was hoping to get farther with that before
> responding to the MVI, but since I was (obliquely) mentioned… :-)

Regarding Usenet<->mailing list gateways, I think there's benefits and
not much down-side if the Usenet group is moderated, but if the group
is not moderated then the it is likely to contain messages that do not
make it to the list, thus confusing list users who see replies to
messages they have not seen.

(c.f. comp.lang.python, where from time to time you see messages from
the moderators of the mailing list announcing that xyz person has been
banned/suspended from posting, apparently blissfully unaware that xyz
is still merrily posting away in the group from which they are
supposedly barred. And, of course, spam.)