Nan:2006-08-16-men-rfd3

From Usenet Big-8 Management Board
From: Jayne Kulikauskas <jayne.kulikauskas@gmail.com>
Subject: 3rd RFD: soc.men.moderated moderated
Newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups, news.groups, soc.men
Followup-To: news.groups
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 09:21:26 -0700

                      REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
                   moderated group soc.men.moderated

This is a formal Request For Discussion (RFD) for the creation of the
moderated Usenet newsgroup, soc.men.moderated.


NEWSGROUPS LINE: soc.men.moderated

soc.men.moderated	Men's interests, roles, rights, relationships, etc. (Moderated)


RATIONALE: soc.men.moderated

The current state of soc.men is a high-noise, high-traffic group that is
very difficult for newcomers (especially if they are new to Usenet as
well) to navigate. Much of the noise comes from inappropriate
cross-posting and excessive flaming.

In the interest of fostering discussion and attracting and accommodating a
growing number of participants, we are proposing to create a moderated
group for general men's issues, as an alternative to soc.men.  Eliminating
crossposts to soc.men.moderated will help to ensure that the newsgroup's
signal-to-noise ratio stays at an acceptable level.  A less noisy, more
civil environment will encourage more new people to participate in the new
moderated group, while the freedoms of soc.men will remain intact for
those who prefer the openness of an unmoderated group.


CHARTER:

The newsgroup soc.men.moderated is for discussion of various men's issues.
This charter is meant to encompass a wide variety of topics, including
but not limited to: men's health, fitness, relationships, rights,
responsibilities, education, sports, and more. Posters are expected
to maintain a basic tone of civility.

In general, crossposting to soc.men.moderated is prohibited.  Infrequent
administrative crossposts (eg. RFDs, FAQs) may occasionally be
allowed at the sole discretion of the moderators.

Appropriate topics for discussion might include (but are not limited to):

  * Men's medical issues.
  * Education of men and boys.
  * Men's fitness.
  * The roles, rights and responsibilities of fathers.
  * Perceptions of men in the media.
  * Men's roles in dating and marriage.
  * Divorce and child custody issues.
  * The roles of nature and nurture in sex differences.
  * Gender discrepancies in law and society.
  * All aspects of professional and amateur sports in which men
    participate.

This newsgroup is moderated.

The following are prohibited and could lead to having such prohibited
posts rejected by the moderator and/or banning of the poster:

  * Personal advertisements.
  * Commercial advertisements and money-making schemes.
  * Chain letters.
  * Posts in HTML.
  * EMP spam.
  * Binaries, apart from PGP signatures, X-Face headers, and other
    ancillary article meta-data.
  * Personally identifying information (residential addresses, telephone
    numbers, government/vehicle identification numbers, etc.) that
    is associated with anyone other than the poster.
  * Forgery of valid e-mail addresses.
  * Unauthorized approval headers.
  * Excessive morphing/nym-shifting.
  * Posts advocating violence or containing physical threats.
  * Content advocating acts which would intrinsically be illegal in
    most places, with the exception of legitimate civil disobedience.
  * Insulting or making personal attacks on another poster of the
    newsgroup, including, but not limited to, gender-based, race-based, or
    sexual-orientation-based bashing.
  * Copyright violations.  Pointers to news articles, blogs, etc. on
    this topic are welcome but are required to comply with fair use
    standards.

The moderators may take any action required to prevent their own legal
liability.


MODERATION POLICY: soc.men.moderated

The moderation software may (now or possibly in the future) enforce the
following policies:

  * Postings must be in plain text. In particular no HTML or mixed text
    and HTML posts will be allowed.

  * Postings should be formatted within 80 characters in width (limiting
    your lines to 72 characters is recommended), and also should not
    exhibit the long/short/long/short/etc misformatting that some posting
    agents can produce when misconfigured.

  * No binary postings of any sort will be accepted. Exceptions will be
    made for cryptographic signatures and such. S/MIME signatures are
    usually far too bulky and will probably not be accepted.

  * Crossposting is generally not allowed.  Infrequent administrative
    crossposts may occasionally be allowed at the sole discretion of the
    moderator.

  * Signature files will be limited to no more than four 80-character lines.

  * An individual poster is limited to no more than 15 messages
    per 24 hr period

  * Mail address blacklisting and whitelisting may be implemented as
    deemed necessary by the moderators.In addition a number of anti-spam
    filters are in place, and will be expanded as needed.

  * Posting with a non-replyable/munged address is discouraged. Posters who
    feel that they must use a munged address are encouraged to append
    ".invalid" to the end of the email address, to indicate that the address
    is not deliverable.


Moderation Mechanics:

A moderation robot script will scan all submitted posts.  Each post will
be either automatically approved, rejected, or sent to the moderators
for manual review.  The moderators will act as a team to handle these
posts - a held submission will be accepted with one 'yes' vote, or
rejected with three 'no' votes.  If no decision is made within 48 hours,
the message will be automatically rejected.  Rejected submissions will
be returned to the poster by email (if possible), with a message stating
the reason for rejection.

If posters wish to appeal the rejection of an article, they may do so by
contacting the moderation team.  The appeal can be accepted with one
yes vote.

Posters may be banned by unanimous vote of the moderators

These thresholds may be changed by the unanimous consent of all moderators.

Moderation policies and mechanics may be changed by unanimous decision
of the moderators, including the technical moderator.

A moderator's term ends upon voluntary resignation or unanimous agreement
of the remaining moderators.  An outgoing moderator may choose his
replacement, unless all remaining moderators, including the technical
moderator, object.  Moderators may be added by unanimous agreement of the
moderators.

The technical moderator has the authority to declare the newsgroup
non-functional and shut it down.   In this case he will set the
robomod to reject all posts submitted, add an explanatory message to
the rejection notice, and send a request for removal to the B8
Management Board or its successor.


Note on Robomoderation:

The robomoderation software (robomod) enforces various anti-spam and text
formatting requirements. In order for posters to receive rejection notices
or other information from the robomod it must have a valid email address
for posters.


MODERATOR INFO: soc.men.moderated

Moderator:                Mark Borgenson <mborgerson@comcast.net>
Technical Moderator:      Graham Drabble <usenet05@drabble.me.uk>
Moderator:                Mark Borgerson <mborgerson@comcast.net>
Moderator:                Grizzle Antagonist <lloydsofhanford@yahoo.com>
Moderator:                Mark Sobolewski <mark_sobolewski@yahoo.com>
Moderator:                Peter J Ross <smm@pjr.britishlibrary.net>

Article Submissions:      soc-men-moderated@drabble.me.uk
Administrative Contact:   soc-men-moderated-request@drabble.me.uk



END MODERATOR INFO



PROCEDURE:

For more information on the newsgroup creation process, please see:

  http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=policies:creation

Those who wish to influence the development of this RFD and its final
resolution should subscribe to news.groups and participate in the
relevant threads in that newsgroup.  This is both a courtesy to groups
in which discussion of creating a new group is off-topic as well as the
best method of making sure that one's comments or criticisms are heard.

All discussion of active proposals should be posted to news.groups.

To this end, the followup header of this RFD has been set to
news.groups.

If desired by the readership of closely affected groups, the discussion
may be crossposted to those groups, but care must be taken to ensure
that all discussion appears in news.groups as well.



DISTRIBUTION:

This document has been posted to the following newsgroups:

  news.announce.newgroups
  news.groups
  soc.men


PROPONENT:

Jayne Kulikauskas <jayne.kulikauskas@gmail.com>



CHANGE HISTORY:

2006-08-09     3rd RFD submitted
2006-07-27     2nd RFD submitted
2006-06-05     1st RFD submitted