Moderation policy for news.groups.proposals

The charter of news.groups.proposals sets the moderation policies. The overall goal is to foster "a healthy environment where ideas can be raised, discussed, and developed."

To accomplish this goal, certain submissions to the newsgroup are rejected. These include articles containing

• personal attacks
• flames
• off topic articles
  • Discussion of proposals relating to other hierarchies, such as alt.* or regional hierarchies.
  • Articles about "the news" or other world events.
  • General discussions not relating to a specific newsgroup proposal.
• unacceptable content
  • Copyright violations
  • Excessive quoting
  • Threats and/or advocating violence
  • Personal and/or commercial advertisements, including chain letters, money-making schemes, and EMP spam.
• unacceptable formats
  • HTML
  • Binaries, except PGP signatures, X-Face headers, and other ancillary meta-data
• attempts to subvert the system, such as:
  • Forgery or imitation of valid e-mail addresses
  • Unauthorized approval headers
  • Excessive morphing/nym-shifting

Crossposting

Articles can be placed in more than one group by crossposting, which is simply listing multiple groups in the Newsgroups: line. This is different than actually posting the same text to several groups. A correctly-functioning news reader will present the article to the reader only in the first group and mark it "read" in the others.

Crossposting discussion of news groups is an interesting issue. It can be helpful, but many groups find it annoying and prefer that the discussion be done only in news.groups.proposals.

Crossposting is generally discouraged, and articles crossposted to a moderated group or more than three groups (news.groups.proposals and two others) will be automatically rejected by the moderation software. If you feel that you really need to crosspost to more groups, please contact the moderation team at the group's administrative contact address, ngp-board@ngp.big-8.org.

The news.groups.proposals moderation team

Head Moderator:	Steve Bonine	spb@pobox.com
Moderator:	Doug Freyburger	dfreybur@yahoo.com
Moderator:	Kathy Morgan	kmorgan@aptalaska.net
Advisory Moderator:	Tim Skirvin	tskirvin@big-8.org

The news.groups.proposals moderation panel consists of volunteers approved by the Big-8 Management Board. Advisory moderators do not approve/reject submissions; their role is (not surprisingly) to offer advice. This advice does not always relate to moderation issues, and includes areas such as moderation software and other technical issues.

If the moderation team decides that more members are needed, they may post an invitation for new volunteers. New members must be approved by vote of the current moderation team and are subject to veto by the Big-8 Management Board. The Big-8 Management Board reserves the right to expel members of the news.groups.proposals moderation panel as necessary.

If you have questions for the moderators, you can email them at the group's administrative contact address, ngp-board@ngp.big-8.org.