Charter for news.admin.moderation

news.admin.moderation (NAM) is a newsgroup dedicated to the discussion
of newsgroup moderation on Usenet - what it is, how it works, and how it
affects Usenet administration as a whole.  news.admin.moderation is itself
a moderated newsgroup, watched over by a combination of a moderation team
and a robot moderator; this moderation is primarily intended to stop
flamewars and ongoing arguments on divisive and never-ending topics such 
as "moderation in general: good or bad?".  

How To Post
===========

(This section assumes that you already know how to post to Usenet newsgroups 
in general.)

All messages must pass through the moderation bot before they hit they are
sent to the moderation team for approval.  Articles that do not match the
following criteria will be automatically rejected:

  o Crossposting is allowed, but restricted; specifically, all crossposted
    and followed-up-to newsgroups must be pre-approved (see below), and no
    more than three groups (and one followup) may be included at any rate.

  o Followups must be set to no more than two groups, all of which must be
    on the crossposting whitelist. If followups are not set and the message
    is crossposted to more than two groups, then the 'bot will set followups
    to just news.admin.moderation.

  o Postings should be formatted within 80 characters in width (limiting
    your lines to 76 characters is recommended).

  o Postings must be in plain text. In particular no HTML or mixed text
    and HTML posts will be allowed, nor will binary messages (with the
    exception of small cryptographic signatures, such as GPG or S/MIME).

  o All submissions will be subjected to a number of anti-spam filters;
    messages that are found to be spam will be silently dropped.

  o Specific threads and/or posters may be blocked by the moderation
    team, offering the ability to close threads and block posters that
    regularly violate the group charter.

In general, messages that pass through the above criteria are queued for
approval or rejection by the moderation team.  However, after a small
number (typically 1-5) of approved posts, users may be added by the
moderators to a group whitelist.  Users on the whitelist are still subject
to the above tests, but their posts may be automatically approved by the
robot moderator, without the need for human intervention.

By default, notification of the message receipt, approval, and/or rejection
are automatically sent to the poster.  If you wish to turn off approval and
receipt notifications, please include this line in your headers (or first 
line of your message):

  X-No-Confirm: yes  

If you wish to similarly turn off rejection notices, please include this
line:

  X-No-Reject: yes  

If you want to do either of these things on a permanent basis, please
contact the moderation team directly.

(Note that these notices will not arrive if the return address is faked; as
such, the use of non-replyable/munged addresses is strongly 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.)

Submissions to the group may also be made by mailing
news-admin-moderation@panix.com or news.admin.moderation@moderators.isc.org.


How To Read
===========

If your news server already carries NAM, simply add the group to your list
of active newsgroups.  If your news server doesn't carry NAM, it might be
a bit more of a challenge; just ask your news administrator (politely!) to
add it.  Include the following detail:

  Moderation Address:   news-admin-moderation@moderators.isc.org

Once this is done, messages should automatically appear on your system,
and you can post as you would to any normal newsgroup; if you have
questions about how to do this, ask your local news administrator.


Crossposting Whitelist
======================

Crossposting is currently allowed to:

  o news.admin.moderation

More groups will be added at the moderator's discretion.  If you would
like to suggest a newsgroup to add to the crossposting whitelist, please
contact the moderation team at news-admin-moderation-request@panix.com.


Charter
=======

  news.admin.moderation is a moderated newsgroup for discussion of newsgroup
  moderation.  Some suitable topics for discussion include:

    * how to be a good moderator
    * moderation "best practices" - for example, how/whether articles should
      be edited before approval; should articles be re-directed to other
      newsgroups; how should article rejections be handled
    * developing appropriate moderation policies and implementations
    * methods for filling vacancies in a moderation team
    * moderation software and moderation hosting services
    * whether moderation is appropriate for a specific topic
    * what to do if the moderator of a group you use disappears, and other
      problems with specific moderated groups
    * whether it would be appropriate to propose demoderating a specific
      group (the actual proposal, if made, would be to the appropriate
      configuration newsgroup)

  Unsuitable topics include:

    * discussion of moderation of web forums, mail lists, etc, except in
      as much as they pertain to newsgroup moderation
    * actual proposals for a new moderated newsgroup (such discussion
      should occur in news.groups.proposals or other configuration
      newsgroups)
    * "moderation in general: good or bad?"
    * flames, attacks and derogatory comments or nicknames

  Minimal crossposts may be allowed at the discretion of the moderators.