OT: comp.cad.solidworks Charter changes

Kathy,

A very good explanation and something I have been looking for. While I appreciate the difficulties and now perhaps the dangers a little better, the option of using a good news reader is also a problem and I have stated why many times. This type of problem is frustrating. Most of the solutions are as bad as the problem. I will say that ccsw has discussed newsreaders and killfiles many times in the past and those that can did long before this discussion started. Aside from the primary source of the problem, there are some troll feeders who will not stop either.

While moving from open to moderated will be a decidedly leaky sieve it will still be an impediment. Since there are one or two that are the cause of this discussion there is also a good chance they are going to be localized to one or two ISPs for injecting posts and therefore easier to deal with. I don't want anybody to describe ways around moderation or how to on being nasty but, am I wrong about this?

Your post did yield one possible solution for those behind corporate firewalls. I found at least one website offering access via email. That would at least allow someone to monitor ccsw during the day and filter the garbage out without having a newsreader.

Easy for users, perhaps not so easy for moderators.

We are a victim of history. If you look at the original signers of the charter you will find the Cxx types in that list from solidworks included one who is something of the TV celebrity on History Channel for something totally unrelated to solidworks. The resource has been built.

TOP

Is there any comprehensive, searchable archive as an alternative to Google? One issue that hasn't been discussed - or I've missed it - is retention time. The LA and SF news servers run by Pacbell/SBC retain headers for quite a while but the messages are gone in a day or so in most instances. I've got Distress set to download both new headers and the messages every 30 minutes but have only been doing so on an ongoing basis since 2006.

No one would be moving to a different site; they simply unsubscribe from the one group and subscribe to a different one on the same server--or they can subscribe to both. If life were fair, it would be the problem posters who would have to change subscriptions, but in practice it's much easier for the many to move voluntarily rather than trying to force one or two determined problem posters to move. Of course, in an ideal world there wouldn't be any problem posters.

Always missing the point, Steve. If YOU requested that your server make its active file world readable (which has no security implications whatsoever), and then YOU told 2Rowdy that you had persuaded them to do it, then YOU would be a more valuable person. YOU wouldn't just constantly complain about the value about somebody else's volunteer effort to make Usenet better, something YOU are unwilling to do yourself.

The bigger point is that yes, we DO care about the small Usenet servers because it's users of servers that have a small user base that gives Usenet more of its flavor, not the users of premium servers on which text Usenet is an afterthought.

Feel free to blast me, Steve, something you're never reluctant to do. The point I still make is that there's no reason to believe that there's anything unrepresentative about the set of servers checked (other than the coincidence that they have world-readable active files).

Don't put words in my mouth, Steve. Is it ever possible for you to argue with someone without lamely resorting to straw men? I didn't say it's predictive. I do say it's representative.

The authors DID NOT choose to limit the search to those servers only. The administrators of all the other servers that can't be searched chose not to make their active files world readable.

You criticize it constantly, because it doesn't back up your meaningless assertions about propagation of newsgroups started by the Bambies.

"People" aren't pointing it out. "People" are stating the obvious. It's a given, but "people" keep hammering away as if "people" had made a new discovery about the tool, which is what you are doing here.

Yes, Steve, there IS reason to believe that the tool presents servers that are representative of the Usenet experience. Servers either recognize Bambie authority and honor Bambie control messages or they don't. The proponent has been promoting the group or he hasn't.

That's 'cuz you have your beliefs firmly in place and won't let the clues penetrate. It's users on the small servers that give Usenet its flavor who are more important to Usenet than those on major servers.

Giganews is NOT a major server with respect to text Usenet, nor are any of the premium servers. Supernews was the exception but it no longer exists. By sheer size of its userbase alone, it contributes articles to text Usenet but the vast majority of its users are not regular text Usenet users. I've used Giganews at times but only because that's what various ISPs have outsourced Usenet to. Not using Usenet for binaries, I'd never be a Giganews subscriber.

You've been told this numerous times but refuse to accept it. The important commercial server with respect to text Usenet is individual.net.

That's a blatantly stupid statement, since the AUTHORS of the tool are not CHOOSING to exclude any server. The administrators of servers not searched excluded themselves. I've said this numerous times, yet you persist in misstating what the authors have done.

No, Steve, I do not draw conclusions about Usenet as a whole, only about hand waiving Bambie advice from Thomas and their sycophants like you.

Thomas and others told the underscore replacement proponents that the new group would be better propagated. I told them that it would be worse. The evidence from the propagation tool supported my position, not your position. Therefore, the propagation tool must be damned.

Out of curiousity, if we were looking up the propagation of a pre-Bambie Big 8 group and the propagation tool reported that it was widely propagated, would the tool not be showing aggragate results from representative servers, Steve?

Idiotic analogy snipped.

Listen carefully, Steve. I asked you to stop making unsubstantiated assertions. If the group is a success, you should be able to support your assertion. That you refuse to support your assertion is what leads me to conclude that it's your usual hand waiving.

Not a fact, Steve. It's an assertion.

Feel free at any time to provide facts. Remember, the group is NOT a success UNLESS all the regulars changes their posting habits AND the Verizon subscribers are posting again. If the messages you are counting were crossposted, well, any statistics you provide would be false.

There's no success without IMPROVEMENT over the underscore group. Thomas didn't claim there was IMPROVEMENT. He declared success despite acknowledging that it doesn't propagate as widely. You declare success claiming that no one cares about the servers it doesn't propagate to.

The one assertion neither one of you has made is what the f*ck was accomplished.

Yeah, kind of odd how he's the "head moderator" of a group he thinks of as "competing" that was set up to promote "congeniality," yet comes into this group being noncongenial.

Kind of odd how he managed to be fair and balanced (as the saying goes) when he was moderating soc.men.moderated, but suddenly became unfair, unbalanced, and arbitrary when thrown a few scraps by his Overlords.

It's been pointed out he's got that conflict of interest in moderating the posters who will fire him if he rejects their messages.

Kathy, are you pretending not to recall that the sole rationale given was withdrawal of alt by Verizon and their alleged inability to subscribe to another News server?

I couldn't possibly make this stuff up.

Agree

'Sporky'

It's a sad old world. I suspect, though, that Kathy had in mind the learning curve for reading news through telnet, that is, essentially the learning curve for NNTP rather than telnet -- the idea of a learning curve for telnet being indeed somewhat baffling.

Such utopias are dreadfully boring, and happily ideal only in the sense of existing solely in the form of a mental conception, don't you think?

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:54:57 -0400, Cliff wrote in :

I guess you're asking, "Would Google be willing to allow its users to avoid moderation by allowing people to post directly to the group without moderator approval?"

Heaven only knows what Google might do. That seems highly unlikely to me at the present time.

Turning a moderated group into an unmoderated group unilaterally? I have heard rumors of such behavior on some news servers. You could always set up your own news server and run it that way if you wished. All news admins are sovereign over their own servers.

Marty

The history of Big-8 groups created in the last couple of years -

Google takes its time about creating new newsgroups in the Big-8 hierarchy even after requests are made to add them. When they are created they are correctly flagged as moderated or unmoderated and they behave correctly for moderated (messages sent by e-mail for approval/rejection) or unmoderated (immediately sent to peers using NNTP).

For those I've checked under alt.* the same happens.

Duh, gee, Doug: How exactly does one look at whatever serves as the active file on Google Groups to learn how the moderation flag is set? How could you have possibly checked all groups for correct flagging?

On Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:23:23 -0400, Cliff wrote in :

People are denying the hypothesis.

With moderated groups, Google relays the post to the moderators. It follows the ordinary Usenet protocols for moderated groups. It does not place the posts in the newsgroup prior to the moderators approving them.

Marty

Cliff, the answer to your question is the same as when you asked it a month ago or so. If it's moderated on Google Groups, then the unapproved message will not be added to the archive, period.

Doug Freyburger has no access to the active file Google Groups so he cannot claim that various groups' moderation flags are set correctly. One might draw such an inference by looking at a message posted via Google Groups on a News server, something Doug cannot do as someone who refuses to use a News server.

No. You are not reading my response. I have tried posting to new and old moderated and new and old unmoderated groups on Google. The behavior displayed by Google was correct - Posts that went to my own moderation queues appeared there, posts to other moderation queues saw some amount of delay until approved. Posts rejected never made it to the archive. Posts to unmoderated queues saw the usual random pattern of when they appered in the archive.

This is not a difficult experiment to do and the results are not difficult to inspect. Go ahead and do it for yourself since you are insistant that others who have done so don't understand your basic question of UseNet behavior and thus have not determined that behavior for themselves.

In spite of Adam H. Kerman's ignorant assertion, standard troll posting behavior, there is no need to examine Google's active file when determining this behavior by experiement. For all I know Google runs their own mutant software that doesn't even have an active file. It does not matter. Determining behavior by experiment is trivial and I have done so on an assortment of groups. His assertion that I would need to do so for all carried groups is equallly ignorant, standard troll posting behavior, as your question is about what happens on Google with new groups and I have done with experiment on several new ones. While past history is no guarantee of future performance, what I have reported on is their recent past performance. Go ahead and fear all you like that they will suddenly diverge from their prior behavior and start doing it incorrectly if you wish to be negative, though.

Incidentally, should you decide to go for a new moderated group with the RFD process, your discussion would be carried on moderated news.groups.proposals so you will be free to ignore the trolls on news.groups if you chose. It's an easier path. The discussion would also be carried on news.groups so you'd be able to deal with the trolls all you like if you so chose. The choice would be up to you at that point.

Another Squirrel's revisionist version of what "troll" means.

B/

That's an understandable reaction to your responses, given that you call anybody who disagrees with you a troll.

Have you ever considered using test groups for testing?

I doubt if Cliff or any other non-abusive Usenet poster will want to annoy moderators by sending them a bunch of test posts.

Adam is in fact mistaken about this issue, but so are you.

The only way of determining what Google's policy is, is to ask Google. Consulting an active file or making inappropriate test posts may provide some indications, but the results won't be authoritative.

The question I asked a few weeks ago was, "What will Google do if an existing Big-8 group is declared to be moderated in place?" I still think it would be useful to obtain an answer to that question.

The question Cliff is asking is more general than mine, and is another question to which I'd like to see an answer from Google instead of your speculation.

Have you done it often enough to demonstrate that you're still a spammer?

You like that phrase, "standard troll posting behavior", don't you? In my experience, people who scream "troll!" whenever they're disgreed with tend to be either trolls or kooks themselves.

Google notoriously diverges from its prior behaviour whenever it "upgrades" its crappy Usenet interface in order to make it a bit crappier.

You seem to be under the impression that Cliff wants a moderated group. Perhaps if you used Usenet properly you'd be able to work out what other people's frequently-stated opinions are.

Are you even aware that some of the advocates of a moderated SolidWorks newsgroup mistakenly consider Cliff to be part of the imaginary problem they want to solve?