Re: Moderator Vacancy Investigation: comp.os.plan9

On 2024-10-29, Anthony <a@9srv.net> wrote:

Tristan Miller <tmiller@big-8.org> wrote:

Dear Steve,
 
On 2024-10-28 22:51, Steve Bonine wrote:

I am sincerely curious.
 
The moderator announced his retirement in July 2013.
 
According that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, the last release of
plan9 was in early 2015.
 
With dozens of dead newsgroups, why this one?  There is no hint in the
MVI that there is any interest in this OS, much less in a newsgroup.

 
The MVI was prompted by one of the directors of the Plan 9 Foundation,
who had written to the Board with the intention of reviving the
newsgroup, perhaps via a bidirectional gateway to the 9fans mailing
list.  He suggested converting the group to unmoderated, but as this is
a rather experimental solution, we proposed running an MVI, at least as
a first step, to see if the group could remain moderated.
 
Yes, perhaps we should have mentioned this in the MVI.  I have written
to the director in question to let him know about the MVI so that he can
weigh in.
 
Regards,
Tristan

>
Hi, I am the director in question. :-)
>
Steve, that does not give a adequate picture of the activity around Plan 9.
In the last few years, the Foundation has been formed, recently got its
501(c)(3) status, and has hosted two instances of the International
Workshop on Plan 9, after a hiatus of (from memory) eight years. There are
two active public forks/distributions, as well as a number of smaller or
one off projects using it as a base.
>
My conversation with the Big 8 board stalled mostly because I was
indecisive about what to do about the bridge to our old mailing list. Since
then, we have been moving farther and farther away from it, and it seems
pretty certain re-creating the bridge would be a bad idea at this point.
>
I don’t know what the right answer is about moderation. I read several
unmoderated news groups which are great, but I’ve also had to abandon a
couple which had turned into trash fires. Simply naming a new moderator is
certainly the simplest path. I am interested, but also don’t wanna be a
single point of failure. I’ve asked on her mailing list if anybody’s
willing to work with me on it. I was hoping to get farther with that before
responding to the MVI, but since I was (obliquely) mentioned… :-)

Regarding Usenet<->mailing list gateways, I think there's benefits and
not much down-side if the Usenet group is moderated, but if the group
is not moderated then the it is likely to contain messages that do not
make it to the list, thus confusing list users who see replies to
messages they have not seen.

(c.f. comp.lang.python, where from time to time you see messages from
the moderators of the mailing list announcing that xyz person has been
banned/suspended from posting, apparently blissfully unaware that xyz
is still merrily posting away in the group from which they are
supposedly barred. And, of course, spam.)