Moderation

2003-3-17 00:59:00

My Friends,

Several of you have brought up the moderated status situation so I thought I would make a few comments.

All members, when they sign up, are automatically placed on moderated status. When Rick first started the list we had no moderation and we kept it that way for several years until we had so much difficulty and complaints of disruption that we had to make the switch. Overall it has been good and has allowed us to stay on topic to a fair degree.

We are not strict about obeying the rules and do allow a little latitude. We even have an off topic program for those who have interesting tidbits for us that the group may find interesting.

When we switched to moderated status we allowed some of the old timers to remain unmoderated, as many of these had a history of being peaceful and obeying the rules of the list. We haven't been moving the newer members to unmoderated status, but if you are not having posts rejected and wish to apply write me or Anni at: "Anni West"

We have been considering placing everyone on moderated status to insure that all have an equal chance of being accepted or rejected.

What type of posts will be rejected?

If you use name calling, inflammatory language or false information, your posts are likely to be rejected. If you are just disagreeing with someone we will usually let it pass unless the disagreement becomes personal or starts to disrupt the group.

So how about the Off Topic (OT) posts. Is this a free-for-all? No, it is not. If you have an interesting poem, inspiring thought or short article of interest we will allow this to go through.

What we want to avoid is the generic copying and pasting of long articles from web pages or SPAMMING us with way off topic stuff. We have been receiving a lot of cut and pasted articles of an inflammatory nature about Bush and the war. Your only chance of getting something like this through is to write your thoughts in your own words using only short quotes, similar to the way I have been writing.

If we allowed some of these inflammatory propaganda pieces through we'd never get back on topic. As it is, the moderation process is not perfect and several have gotten through and forced my hand to respond to them.

Diane L is our main moderator and Rick and I do a little when we get around to it -or if Diane refers a difficult post to me. Some pieces are judgment calls but overall the list is much more stable because of this process.