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