Re: MODERATOR (NOT MODERATORS?) FOUND for rec.photo.moderated, comp.std.announce, comp.newprod, and comp.simulation

In article <102k694$9ev8$1@dont-email.me>, ahk@chinet.com says...

 
Moderated Usenet newsgroups need multiple moderators and a moderator
succession plan. Moderated newsgroups without this have failed.
 
The hierarchy administrators know this, yet continue to accept
subsequent moderators who are not proposing to take over a group with
multiple moderators and a succession plan.
 
Doctor! It hurts when I do this!
Stop doing it.

As one of those hierarchy administrators, my attitude has been:

- I would oppose the creation of a new moderated group, unless multiple
  moderators were in place from the start.
- For moderated groups that already exist, a single moderator is
  far from ideal, but infinitely better than a completely defunct group.
  I strongly recommend that any such moderator should try the best they
  can to recruit additional moderators.
- Moderated groups for which no moderator can be found should be
  rmgrouped or have their moderation flag unset (we're in the process of
  doing this for a bunch of long-disused moderated groups; I don't
  particularly like removing groups, but a group that just generates
  bounce messages is IMHO worse than useless).

I'd say that rejecting any moderation proposal for an existing group
that doesn't involve multiple moderators and/or a succession plan is
also a perfectly reasonable position. Given the general lack of
volunteers, though, this would realistically mean that more groups would
need to be rmgrouped, converted to unmoderated, or left disused.

I'm personally in the same boat. Has someone written a parser that I
could modify to strip Mail headers, leaving the proto article
otherwise intact to be injected into Usenet?
 
I'm a clueless git with respect programming languages, but I can
follow patterns if I discover other headers added by Mail servers that
require stripping.

If you're on some sort of Unix system, you might actually be able to do
most of the work using just the 'formail' mail-formatting utility: this
has options to strip/append/rename headers, and/or keep only the headers
you specify.

PyModerator takes the approach of creating a proto-article using only
the following headers from the original email message:

Subject
From
Reply-to
Organization
References
Newsgroups
Followup-to

It uses its own simplistic parser to create a dictionary of headers
(ParseMessageLines() in serverFiles.py), but if I were writing it from
scratch I'd use email.parser from the standard library.

STUMP, meanwhile, strips some headers and renames others, using a
combination of formail and Perl regular expressions (see
bin/submission.pl and bin/processApproved in the STUMP source tree).
Again, this probably isn't the best way; using a module such as
Email::Simple or Email::MIME and keeping only a short list of allowed
headers might be more sensible.

My succession plan is going to be begging more of the group's regulars
to step up. I volunteered but I'm kind of stuck.

Respect to you for stepping up. We've also found that getting more
volunteers is a difficult task.

Rayner