Re: Moderated groups (Was:Re: Lebanon)

"Ian Davis" <ijdavis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ea65if$bl3$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <4ilurtF4deolU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Yowie <yowie9644.DIESPAMDIE@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Would there be any value, knowing the freaks out there in Usenet, to have
alt.sexual.abuse.recovery.moderated as an *unmoderated* group? Can I ask
you
to perhaps browse alt.religion.wicca.moderated and then compare it to its
umoderated parent group?


[ Unread news in alt.religion.wicca 4763 articles
[
[ Invalid (bogus) newsgroup found: alt.religion.wicca.moderated
[ Moving bogus newsgroups to the end of '/u2/ijdavis/.newsrc'.
[ Delete bogus newsgroups? [ny]

I have access to alt.religion.wicca on my news server but not the
newsgroup
you named, for the reasons given above.

Ah well. Youcould access it via Google (hiss, spit) if youreally wanted, or
I could give you a web page so thatyou could request its propogation on your
news server, but considering it was just an excercise in comparing an
umoderated group with a moderated one, how about we just let it slide
(Unless of course, youreally do want to access it... then I'd be happy to
help)

It might be a perverse way of moderating abuse, but the approach here
which is to treat abuse with silence while far from effective in providing
instantaneous responses that perhaps moderation would, is quite remarkable
in that it works as well as it does, when by rights it seems fatally
flawed
as a mechanism for silencing not the self but others. For the most part
I'm left with the suspicion with those who would get their jollies
provoking
trouble, find SRQ a less than fun place to do so, with the result that in
the long term we suffer less a abuse than most newsgroups seem to. What
say
you?

First of all, I suspect that the term "Quaker" doesn't really mean alot ot
most people, so the frothing maniacs don't tend to notice it much. Second,
its not really all that atcive, which won't call people's attention to it if
htey use Google Groups. And third, Quakers (and those who have an
affiliation for Quakerliness) don't give the trolls the food htey need to
survive: attention.

In rec.pets.cats.anecdotes, we tend to get sporadic trollery that happens to
coincide with the school holidays inteh USA (strange,that). Its pretty
predictable, someone posts that they had a cat for dinner or some other
aulirophobic material. Instead of defendingour love of cats, we at RPCA use
the troll to fuel another passion we seemt o share: food. We hold a
Troll-B-Q and post recipes. Effectively we hijack the thread back into
something we want to read. Its works remarkably effectively. However, onw of
the things baout the poeple who post to RPCA that tends to make them a bit
different to most other NGs is that we consider ourselves a community and
our relationship with each other goes beyond cyberspace and into Real LIfe.
Therefore when RPCA is under threat, we can act as a cohesive group to deal
with the issue (usually by killfiling the troll en mass so that no-one inthe
group sees them, and hterefore they just don't have the desired effect).
Having a closed and private e-mail list for the majority of posters also
allows us to let off the steam that trolls cause in privacy, so that the
trolls never know just how much they've upset us. RPCA as a group also
strongly recommends news.individual.net as the newserver of choice, as it
does a remarkably good job at filtering out spam and crossposting.

Even at the height of our troll issue, we just kept up our defence, refused
to let them ruin the group. Indeed, as the volume of rubbish posts
incresesed, we started posting not less but *more* anecdotes in defence,
even re-posting old anecdotes that newer members may not have seen. The
trolls would *not* shut down our group like they had to two others.

Others may have chosen to be moderated. It was discussed (in the private
e-mail group), and rejected. But had the abuse of the group continued to the
point where people had had enough and couldn't fight any logner, then
perhaps we would have gone to moderation. But the tactics work, especially
when the group as a whole stands together.

In a strange way the choice is between policing others and policing
ourselves.
Consider it if nothing else an interesting social experiment and an
interesting
philosophical alternative to the obviously better methods of arriving at
conflict resolution.

To each different problem there is a different solution. Certainly,
moderation isn't the best and only solution in every case. But it does have
its place, and its usefulness.

Yowie

.