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

In article <luvrc3Fcm0jU1@mid.individual.net>, iulius@nom-de-mon-
site.com.invalid says...

 
We converted in June 2023 two moderated newsgroups in the fr.* hierarchy
to unmoderated newsgroups (fr.misc.handicap and fr.soc.homosexualite).
The change was reflected by 2 dedicated "newgroup" control articles and
subsequent "checkgroups" control articles.
 
It permitted postings to be allowed again in these newsgroups, as the
moderation was no longer working.  It worked, as some discussions then
took place in these newsgroups.  But if you look at them now, you'll see
they are still empty, due to the lack of interest and contributors,
which is a global issue on Usenet-fr and Usenet in general, not specific
to these 2 newsgroups.
 
In 2011, 2 newsgroups were similarly unmoderated: fr.bienvenue and
fr.comp.lang.php.  These newsgroups are still more or less active, so it
proves to work.

Hi Julien,

Thank you, this is very helpful! It's particularly good to have some
recent examples.

So to respond to your question, in works in practice though you
shouldn't count on that action to magically revive newsgroups.  We
checked at that time that the groups were properly made unmoderated in
the servers mostly used by fr.* contributors, and it was the case.
 
If you wish to check on the news servers you have access to, feel free
to do that and no longer rely on speculation :-)

This is useful information, and suggests that servers not processing the
change of status may not be as much of a problem as we feared.

I would also like to add that if a news server does not reflect the
unmoderation status, it won't do any harm anyway.  The newsgroups were
empty before the change, and they will remain empty after the change
because they expect approved messages.  The news servers which reflect
the change will work as expected and the unmoderated newsgroups may have
postings.  So basically, it is a better situation than before!

A convincing point :-)

Just in case, occasional messages could be posted with an "Approved"
header to inform users of the change of status, so that anyone reading
the group on a server that did not process the change would know that a
problem existed.

I may be wrong but I really doubt that unmoderating newsgroups will
revive them, so if their topics no longer seem relevant to the Usenet
audience, just deleting them would be fine.

True, unmoderating a group doesn't mean there will be people who want to
post there, so deleting the group is likely to be preferable if there's
no reason to think anyone would use it anyway.

If it's not clear whether there is still interest in a group, I suppose
there'd be the possibility of unmoderating it and then deleting it later
if it remains unused.

Thank you again for the insights!

Kind regards,
R