Re: 2nd RFD: Remove rec.radio.broadcasting - LAST CALL FOR COMMENTS (REDUX)

In <vl9bss$u25$2@dont-email.me> Tristan Miller <tmiller@big-8.org> writes:

This is a formal Request for Discussion (RFD) to remove the moderated
newsgroup rec.radio.broadcasting.

The Big-8 Management Board plans to begin voting on this proposal
after five days.  Please offer any final discussion or comments before
the end of this waiting period.  Voting may take up to one week (7
days); a result will be posted following the end of the voting period.

 [...]
 

2025-01-03: Final RFD / Last Call for Comments (redux)

Five days after this LCC was posted would be January 8th as the start of
voting, then until the 15th for the end of the voting period, according
to the above.

However, the following item appeared in the Big-8 Management Board for
Usenet minutes for January 10th:


"rec.radio.broadcasting

TM posted the LCC. Voting period runs from 2025-01-08 to 2025-01-15. The
Board received an e-mail asking the group to be converted from moderated
to unmoderated. The Board had initiated a discussion on this practice in
news.admin.moderation back on 2024-02-23 but it did not attract many
responses; however, the recent mass deletion RFD has re-ignited the
issue in news.groups.proposals news.groups.proposals on Google
Groups. To summarize the discussions to date, despite the existence of a
well-defined mechanism for changing the moderation flag via a control
message, it's unclear whether anyone has actually tried to issue such a
message, and whether news servers will properly act on it. The meeting
therefore considered whether rec.radio.broadcasting, which seems
destined for deletion, could serve as a test case. That is, rather than
deleting the group, the we could change the moderation submission
address to a big-8.org account, send a control message to change the
group's moderation flag, and then see if posts made to the group from
various news servers go to the submission address or directly to the
group. It was agreed to further explore this idea for discussion at the
next meeting."

(excerpted above from https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Minutes/2025-01-10)


Note that you did get at least one reply on news.admin.moderation, from
me, objecting to the idea.  See:

https://news.admin.moderation.narkive.com/Mtfy21b8/practical-experiences-of-demoderating-a-moderated-group

The next meeting of the Board would be January 17th, two days after the
conclusion of voting on this LCC.

What is the Board's intentions on this MVI and LCC?  Is it confined to
just voting yes/no on deleting the newsgroup?  If the vote is no (do not
delete), does the Board intend to spring on the readership a previously
undiscussed (at least for rec.radio.broadcasting specifically) intention
to convert this newsgroup to unmoderated?  This strikes me as
unprecedented, potentially out of order, and ultimately, a bad idea.  I
would hope that there would be further public discussion about this, as
it seems to be substantially "new business," to be debated on its own
merits.

The former moderators and I had sought to cooperate with the Board as
much as possible to notify them of the moderators' resignations, to help
find new moderators, or failing that, to ensure an orderly shutdown of
the newsgroup, out of respect for the contributions of the past
moderation teams, including its founder, William Pfeiffer (RIP).

My comments below are excerpted from private e-mail exchange with the
Board.

I had understood that the Board had already voted on this proposal last
January, based on reading the minutes.  I had not commented on the
proceedings, not just because I wanted someone else to step forward, but
because the moderation team and I had taken all reasonable steps to
notify others of the shutdown (Usenet, Facebook groups, Reddit
subreddits, web forums, mailing lists, etc.) and concluded that the
newsgroup had just come to the end of its natural life due to loss of
audience.  The near universal response to these notifications was that
they didn't know that the newsgroup was still alive.  They weren't
interested in participating in it, let alone moderating it.  I did get a
couple of replies to the Usenet announcements from readers of the
newsgroup.  One noted that news items typically appeared on the
newsgroup a day or two sooner than other sources.  I asked if they were
willing to pre-fund the Panix moderation account to get it up and
running again.  I did not get any replies.

The last two viable use cases for the newsgroup were:

- Abstracting news articles from RSS feeds

- Followup nostalgia/threadomancy from the archives about radio stations
  and talent from years ago, and discussing "Where are they now?"

The first one went away when Google Feedburner stopped supporting e-mail
feeds.  I did not find a replacement solution that didn't involve a lot
of scratch programming or registering with a commercial service.  The
second one will be more difficult without a long retention news site
that allows posting.  One of the major free ones, Google Groups,
recently went away.

But now we have the possibility of unmoderating the newsgroup.  It may
not work, it may partially work enough to theoretically allow
propagation of unmoderated submissions to at least some of Usenet.
However, without a realistic audience, this article propagation will
likely be off-topic content and SPAM, if at all.  For example, see the
unmoderated alt.radio.broadcasting, which already exists, and for which
an unmoderated rec.radio.broadcasting would be a duplicate.

In summary, the former moderation team and I had sought an adoption or a
decent burial.  I'm not sure that we consented to donate the body to
science for experimentation of questionable value.  I'm also not sure
that the readership of Usenet had reasonably understood that this was a
possible outcome of this MVI and LCC.

--
Paul W. Schleck
pschleck@panix.com