Re: Should comp.lang.c.moderated be revived?

On 11/03/2025 03:08, Keith Thompson wrote:

I just saw a post on news.announce.newgroups posted 2025-01-03, subject
"1st RfD: Mass-deletion of moderated groups without a moderator".
 "This is a formal Request for Discussion (RFD) to remove the following
101 moderated newsgroups."
 comp.lang.c.moderated is on the list.
 Seebs was the moderator of comp.lang.c.moderated, but has
not participated since 2014.  There have been no posts on
comp.lang.c.moderated since then.
 There have been discussions here in comp.lang.c in 2018 and 2021
about reviving comp.lang.c.moderated.  I emailed Seebs about this
at the time, and he expressed tentative interesting in seeing it
revived, but with someone else moderating it.
 My tentative opinion is that it's probably not worth reviving,
but if others are sufficiently interested *and* someone volunteers
to moderate it, perhaps it could be done.  If it were revived,
I'd certainly subscribe and participate.
 

Subscribing to a group costs nothing more than a tiny bit of screen real estate to show the group name, even if it is silent.  I am subscribed to a few dead, or almost dead, groups - I am sure most Usenet regulars are.   So if c.l.c.m were resurrected, I'd subscribe - and would reply if any threads did pop up that I thought were worth replying to.
However, I cannot imagine it receiving much traffic.  Many of the interesting threads here are started by new people, or by posters who are likely to find themselves censored or limited by a moderator - without such posters, there would be no life in the group.
If a discussion group is moderated, it really needs multiple moderators spread across times - otherwise it is too slow, and gives too much power and responsibility to one person and their subjective opinions.
So it is hard for me to imagine that it would be worth the effort.

One possible concern is that if comp.lang.c.moderated is removed,
historical posts might be lost.  I don't know whether that's
a valid concern.  It might depend on the policies of individual
Usenet servers and archives.
 

It also depends on what the posts are, and how much is of use or interest to anyone else.