OT: comp.cad.solidworks Charter changes

Marty,

I am one that has been here a long time. I see our situation here as the same thing you see in the real world where a neighborhood is a nice place until the drug dealers move into the area. At that point the easy thing for the "nice" people to do is move out to someplace where the dealers aren't. But there are also those in the neighborhoods that decide they don't want to leave, it was a nice place to live, and the neighborhood concensus is that by golly, we need to take our neighborhood back from the trash, and I'm willing to do something about it rather than just leave. So, I am also one that has not left the neighborhood because the drug dealers moved in and am willing to stand up here and say that I support a change to take back the neighborhood. I have always liked the wild, wild, west feel here, but the drug dealers don't play by the same rules. So if there are enough supporters who are willing to raise their hand for the change, I think it merits consideration. Thanks.

WT

Reply to
Wayne Tiffany
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Kathy,

A very well written explanation about the issues involved. I believe we all want/hope for a easy solution...

Thanks.

Reply to
zxys

Understood and I wouldn't disagree. I simply made an observation. Someone ought to post Denis McKeon's FAQ if it hasn't been.

I didn't post this bit. Neil did. No matter.

I think many use a good newsreader but a group of posters that contribute significantly apparently only have access to this group through Google's web based system and that is the real problem. I personally find this hard to believe but at some point you have to be willing to take people at face value. There is also a real reason to block outbound NNTP traffic and that lends great credence to any claim.

As an example, I've been "invited" on three occasions to "visit" the peoples republic of Iraqnam by the American Department of Defense. None of my "visits" exceeded two weeks in length so electronic mail was just blocked in my case outside of the .mil hierarchy. This meant I didn't have the use of my mail client in country so when I needed to communicate with my staff electronically I used a little trafficked News Group. My SMTP communications were blocked but NNTP traffic wasn't. I gather this has changed recently .

In the same vein, corporations don't want their stuff in the public domain and have significant exposure when it happens. A board of directors has a little protection if they block NNTP clients and monitor and filter electronic mail. They would sacrifice that protection from things like shareholder litigation if proprietary information ended up on Usenet. It's a matter of due diligence and resource allocation.

One can only conclude from history and this discussion that Usenet isn't the place for professionals looking to build an independent resource when you have to rely on Google for your front end. There will always be enough turds in the honey to leave GoogleGroupers adrift in a sea of flotsam.

Reply to
John R. Carroll

The alleged "yes" votes came from a deliberately mis-designed poll off a Web site. The alleged "yes" votes were nothing more than "me too" comments, which in real configging discussions are ignored as insubstantial.

Yeah. Why don't you read the advice given in the thread about moderation in place?

Reply to
Adam H. Kerman

If you read Kathy's message carefully, she put Neil's attribution at the end of her last paragraph of followup to your quote, then used the same quoting level for your quoted comments and Neil's. In other words, she piggybacked her followup to Neil into a followup to your message and used the sloppiest possible method of attributing the remarks.

Gee. I can't imagine why you would think it to be a mal-formed followup.

Reply to
Adam H. Kerman

Dave,

My question was supposed to be specific limited to the board members who responded and have stated they would vote "NO". I don't seem to be doing a good job of expressing myself, let me try again.

From reading previous posts it seems the board vote will be "NO" and will not change no matter what we submit. A "NO" vote result by the board even if comp.cad.solidworks group asked for the change by an overwhelming majority vote, meets all of the criteria in the "change rule" and are fully aware of the downside of "Moderation-in-place" as you have outlined above.

The group is looking at alternatives.

Appreciate your input,

Tom

Reply to
brewertr

Ah. So they could even set up a Big 8 moderated group on their own, then, as long as they were willing to work on the propagation?

I believe that would go against the stated goals of the founder of that hierarchy (although we well know that the "stated" is usually untrue).

B/

Reply to
Brian Mailman

Others have said something quite similar. Very perceptive.

B/

Reply to
Brian Mailman

:

As Neil said, "farcical."

You would use your all-important vote for a group that you know nothing about, that doesn't even have an RFD yet. You know nothing of their moderation schema, or the appropriateness of their moderator-candidates. You know nothing about their Rationale, or whether they've tried other solutions before moderation, which should be a last-force-ncessary.

You know nothing....

If they want a moderated group, they might as well just send the control messages themselves and start work on propagation rather than wait for your collective foolishness.

B/

Reply to
Brian Mailman

Can you list those "yes" votes or should I say "I Agree" that came from that misdesigned poll from someones websight. I voted YES and didn't get any notice from any websight. What difference is there between a YES & I AGREE since they both answered the original question of this topic.

----== Posted via Pronews.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==----

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The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups

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Reply to
j

I see that now and can only repeat that it's not important. She ought to have put Neil's words in quotes, especially if she's going to include things that weren't part of my post - the one she responded to. People who want to make themselves understood are responsible to do so and she did. What I wanted to clarify was who said what and I did.

It's worth noting that I wasn't obnoxious or snarky in my comment and her post had a lot of value. This discussion doesn't seem the place for that behavior. I think the posters here (CCS) appreciate what they are learning. They may not like the facts but they probably won't deny them.

Sending out control messages targeting posts here by the two offenders is an alternative and it's about as workable as moderation in place. It also has the benefit of side stepping any consent outside the group and will work on servers that accept control messages. I believe Google does so the GoogleGroupers would get some relief going forward.

As a legal matter,given the general consensus here, you wouldn't be violating any ISP's TOS and you could notice the ISP's in advance and document the groups wishes to see if there would be a problem.

It's my considered opinion that unless the offenders moderate their own behavior things are unlikely to change. Such moderation isn't within the purvue of the Big8 or anyone else. It's up to the offenders.

Google would offer filtering if they had any common sense. They are missing an opportunity to add value and they could charge for the service. This is something they could even add to their goofy tool bar and let each user customize themselves. Were this to be the case, the burden on Google would be zero and every afflicted user would migrate to their new browser. I believe Google is trying to encourage just such a migration.

Reply to
John R. Carroll

No. In a newly-started moderated group in an administered hierarchy, the relay is set up on behalf of the hierarchy administrator, not the moderator. I don't know if the relay is set up before the initial newgroup message is sent or if the same order applies as it does in alt. The relay would be changed upon request of the moderator or the hierarchy administrator.

Reply to
Adam H. Kerman

Some of us think proper attribution on Usenet is important. Some of us are amazed that someone who sits on a hierarchy administration committee can't send a properly formatted Usenet message.

She didn't make herself understood since you didn't see the partly hidden attribution the first time you read the messages. That's a bad thing.

I'm paid by the sarcastic remark.

Uh, you're proposing to issue third-party CANCELS? Don't do that. If your News administrator has any ethics, he'd boot your ass off his system immediately with prejudice.

You're full of shit on both the legality of third-party cancels and consensus that anyone but you has suggested such a solution.

That's not moderation but self restraint.

You're insane. Google Groups offers a bad Usenet experience and is a bad player with regard to originating massive amounts of Usenet abuse. It's a feature.

Reply to
Adam H. Kerman
[...]

A) Google isn't Usenet.

2) Google isn't needed to read newsgroups. I can read newsgroups at work and at home without even thinking the word "Google."
Reply to
David Bostwick

I'm not going to do anything.

The consensus on the behavior and desired result of any action was what I was referring to, not the solution.

by Denis McKeon

URL: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/news/moderated-ng-faq

Subject: Q3.6 Can moderation be accomplished retro-actively?

To most people, newsgroup moderation means the process of filtering and approval-before-posting described above.

Cancellation of messages by a third party - someone other than the poster or the poster's system administrator - after the message has been posted is sometimes referred to as retroactive moderation.

Some on-line services and Fidonet use cancellations issued by service employees or by Fido sysops as a way of keeping discussion in their conference areas by their subscribers on-topic.

While cancellation and moderation may seem superficially similar, there are strong sentiments in Usenet against third party cancellation.

The net news protocols allow the sending of control messages, messages which contain instructions for news servers, usually to cancel or supersede other messages. This allows people to cancel messages sent by mistake, or sent in error to the wrong newsgroups, or to cancel a "for sale" ad after the item has been sold.

The effect of cancel messages depends on how each individual news server site is configured - a site may honor or ignore a control message, or send a message on to a human for manual handling.

Cancellation of messages is a touchy subject, because cancellation can be abused, and because it can be difficult to distinguish why a message was cancelled - was it because a message was posted to many groups, or because of who posted it, or because of the content of the message?

It is generally accepted that people may cancel their own messages, and that ISPs or system administrators may cancel messages which originated at their site and which are inappropriate for some reason.

It is generally accepted that a moderator may cancel messages posted with forged approval to a newsgroup s/he moderates.

It is less accepted that a moderator may also cancel messages that the moderator (or a mod-bot) initially approved and posted, if the moderator later finds the message inappropriate for some reason.

Since 1995, a number of people routinely issue cancel messages for messages excessively cross-posted or multiply posted to large numbers of newsgroups. (Such posts often are called "spam".)

Cancellation based on the number of newsgroups an article is cross-posted or multi-posted to, or of binary posts in non-binary newsgroups, or of commercial advertisements in non-commercial newsgroups are often widely accepted as beneficial to the affected newsgroups.

However, there is less agreement about cancellation based on content - such as whether a message is on-topic or off-topic for a newsgroup, a decision which is usually much more of an opinion or judgement.

A key issue here is whether cancels are supported by the wide majority of the users of a newsgroup, and are issued by people who have the support of such a majority. If there is a sense of wide community support, retroactive cancellation could be effective in fostering on-topic communication in an UNmoderated group.

However, use of retroactive content based cancels without wide support can often lead to meta-discussions about the cancels, which be worse for the signal/noise ratio than the cancelled posts.

So, while newsgroup moderation and retroactive cancellation both rely on people making decisions about the content of newsgroups, the key elements that they should share are wide support, prior consent, an expectation of predictability, and a degree of accountability, and the key differences are that moderated groups are formally set up with a central moderation address, while groups that rely on retroactive cancellation are usually otherwise unmoderated.

For more about cancellation of articles, see:

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The Cancel FAQ

If you are thinking of cancelling other people's news articles, for any reason, you should check your internet provider's policies or "terms of service" first, or contact their support staff to see if they allow this activity, and to make them aware of your plans.

Whatever, it's the only practical solution.

And?

I guess I either don't understand your comment or you missed my point. Google could easily incorporate the required functionality into "Chrome" if they were interested in driving the market to their product. This woudn't have any effect on their policies or activities any more that my rudimentary filtering does with Outlook Distress. The plus would be that GoogleGroupers would still have full access to archival information if they wanted. It's a win-win and the qestion then becomes not why would Google do it but why wouldn't they. See what I mean?

Reply to
John R. Carroll

I didn't say it was. LOL

I didn't say it was.

So?

Reply to
John R. Carroll

Blogger wrote what was happening here, gave his opinion and in the last paragraph asked people who read, post to or use to post to comp.cad.solidworks to follow the link provided, urged people to vote yes (Agree) and urged them to read Paul's proposed charter changes.

A get out the vote campaign is all, nothing more sinister than that.

From -

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[ Since 1997, the usenet newsgroup comp.cad.solidworks has been a fantastic source of information and a place to meet some of the best SW users around. That is until one individual decided that it was his personal soapbox for whatever argument, whether it had value or not.

People dropped out at a faster and faster rate. I eventually dropped out because the signal to noise ratio was simply too low, and the ridiculous personal attacks on other people as well as myself are things you can only tolerate up to a point. I?ve posted a few blog articles chronicling the fall of comp.cad.solidworks.

Whether you know him as Paul Kellner, kellnerp or TOP (the other Paul), he is spearheading the charge to reclaim c.c.sw from the trolls. The only thing that will work to reclaim this little bit of independent territory for SW users is some moderation. One individual does not have the self control or decency or respect for others to act like an adult, so the rest of us are going to impose some limits. There were other offenders who follow him around, but I?m pretty sure that if we shovel out the stall, the flies will go away.

One of the charms of c.c.sw was its feeling of the wild wild west. The analogy eventually breaks down because in the real wild west, people had guns, and everybody respected a gun. At c.c.sw the outlaws have no such respect. Anyway, sherriff Paul is going to clean up this one horse town, and give the rest of us our freedom back. Freedom of expression applies to all of us, not just one.

Reading news groups through a news server with a news reader allows you more options than any web-based forum. You can never get two people to agree how a web forum should be set up. But you can always find a news reader that you like. Whether Outlook, Netscape, Mozilla Thunderbird, Xnews, Xplanet Gravity, Opera, or the Google interface, you get way more options than a web based app. Plus, you can read offline. The news reader works like an email client. You can sort by threads, show indented lists, block senders, search senders, assign points system based on keywords, sort by points? basically you can get as sophisticated as you like, particularly with readers like Xnews.

So if you?re an old c.c.sw er, or just a newsgroup/forum junkie, follow the link at the top and make a post that says simply ?agree?. Read what Paul has to say. Bring back the usefulness of comp.cad.solidworks. ]

Tom

Reply to
brewertr

I haven't seen anything that would make me inclined to vote YES.

The Board's mission is to maintain a hierarchy of well-named, well-used groups. If we vote against a moderation change, it's because we don't think such a change is likely to result in a well-used group. We don't have a blanket policy against retromoderation only because we don't want to tie our own hands. I can't think of a case where I'd support it, but I can imagine it's possible.

-Dave, B8MB member speaking for himself

Reply to
Dave Sill

On Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:22:55 -0500, "Wayne Tiffany" wrote in :

Now we have to separate and (in my view) intractable problems:

  1. You have a person who has posted to your group under 20 different aliases (according to one informant). Will you allow that person to vote
20 times? If not, by what objective criteria will you distinguish "fake" posters from "real" posters? Why shouldn't lurkers have a vote? Etc., etc.
  1. As Kathy and Dave pointed out, even if the board changed our official list to make the group moderated, there are many news servers that would not follow suit.

There are two realistic alternatives:

  1. Soldier on with filters and killfiles.

  1. Set up a moderated companion group.

I've seen the costs and benefits of both in my Usenet lifetime, such as it is.

Marty

Reply to
Martin X. Moleski, SJ

"We don't have a blanket policy against retromoderation . . . "

One user in a different sub-thread, whom you are not following up to, is discussing retromoderation. Does not apply to this sub-thread. Retromoderation means the sending of third-party cancels as a countermeasure to perceived off-topic messages in a newsgroup, but more likely used because the canceller simply doesn't like what was written or who posted.

This sub-thread is discussing moderation-in-place, that is, an attempt to get every server that had created a specific newgroup as unmoderated to change the flag to moderated simultaneously.

Since you don't know what the hell you are talking about, Dave, would you care to withdraw that comment?

Reply to
Adam H. Kerman

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