Nan:2006-10-09-proposals-rfd
From Usenet Big-8 Management Board
From: Dave Sill <de5@big-8.org> Subject: RFD: news.groups.proposals moderated Newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups, news.groups, news.admin.announce, news.admin.hierarchies Followup-To: news.groups Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 10:02:03 -0700 REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD) moderated group news.groups.proposals This is a formal Request For Discussion (RFD) for the creation of the moderated Usenet newsgroup, news.groups.proposals. NEWSGROUPS LINE: news.groups.proposals news.groups.proposals Development of Big 8 proposals. (Moderated) RATIONALE: news.groups.proposals Proposals for changes to the Big 8 hierarchies (e.g., creating new groups or removing dead groups) are currently discussed and developed in news.groups, which is unmoderated. Unfortunately, the environment in news.groups has not been conducive to this process for some time. As noted by Russ Allbery in his recent "hierarchy management transition" document (<1159661096.29508@isc.org>), "[t]he biggest risk facing the Big Eight newsgroup creation system going forward is the lack of a congenial and constructive place for discussion of changes to the group list." The proposed news.groups.proposals would solve this problem by creating a healthy environment where ideas can be raised, discussed, and developed. The group will be manually moderated to remove personal attacks, flames, and other inappropriate content, but disagreement and dissenting opinions will still be encouraged. All proposal discussions that currently take place in news.groups will move to news.groups.proposals upon its creation. news.groups will remain unmoderated and can be used for posting articles less appropriate for news.groups.proposals, including discussions of overall Big-8 policy. The B8MB will continue to monitor news.groups, and regular announcements will continue to be posted there. CHARTER: The newsgroup news.groups.proposals is for the announcement, discussion, and development of changes to the Big 8 hierarchies, as documented at: http://www.big-8.org/ All official discussion of proposals as described in the creation documents and elsewhere should take place in news.groups.proposals. All proponents must follow news.groups.proposals. news.groups.proposals is hand-moderated. Discussions should pertain to existing or potential proposals to create, remove, or modify newsgroups in the Big-8 newsgroup hierarchies (comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc, and talk). For example, the following are not allowed: * Off topic articles, including: - Personal advertisements - Commercial advertisements and money-making schemes - Chain letters - EMP spam * Articles with unacceptable content, such as: - HTML - Copyright violations - Advocation of violence - Threats - Binaries, except PGP signatures, X-Face headers, and other ancillary meta-data - Personal attacks - Flames * Attempts to subvert the system, such as: - Forgery of valid e-mail addresses - Unauthorized approval headers - Excessive morphing/nym-shifting - Crossposting excessively or to unrelated groups Posting with a non-replyable/munged address is discouraged. If you feel you must use a munged address, you are encouraged to append ".invalid" to the end of the email address to indicate that the address is not deliverable. Discussions of overall Big-8 policy will remain in news.groups. MODERATION POLICY: news.groups.proposals All submissions may be approved or rejected by a single member of the moderation team based on the above criteria. The moderation team will attempt to handle all submissions promptly, and (as a team) will not knowingly "blackhole" a poster by neither approving nor rejecting his or her submissions. Where reasonable, users will be notified of rejected submissions via email. Rejections may be appealed by contacting the Big-8 Management Board, at board@big-8.org. Note that submissions may be filtered to remove spam, spews, and other attacks. All substantive modifications to the moderation policy will go through the standard RFD/LCC system before implementation. Crossposting limitations are still under discussion. MODERATOR INFO: news.groups.proposals Moderator: Joe Bernstein <joe@big-8.org> Moderator: Brian Edmonds <brian@big-8.org> Moderator: James Farrar <james@big-8.org> Moderator: Jonathan Kamens <jik@big-8.org> Moderator: Thomas Lee <tfl@big-8.org> Moderator: Martin Moleski <moleski@big-8.org> Moderator: Dave Sill <de5@big-8.org> Moderator: Tim Skirvin <tskirvin@big-8.org> Article Submissions: news-groups-proposals@big-8.org Administrative Contact: news-groups-proposals-request@big-8.org All members of the Big-8 Management Board will be members of the news.groups.proposals moderation team. Board membership policy is documented at: http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=policies:membership Additional non-Board Member moderators may be added or removed from the moderation team at the discretion of the Board. 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 news.admin.announce news.admin.hierarchies PROPONENT: Dave Sill <de5@big-8.org> Co-Proponent: The Big-8 Management Board <board@big-8.org> CHANGE HISTORY: 2006-10-09 1st RFD