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

On 15.06.2025 00:20 Uhr Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

In news.groups.proposals Rayner Lucas
<usenet202101@magic-cookie.co.uknospamplease> wrote:

As a contribution towards the latter, I have ported PyModerator to
Python 3 (https://github.com/PyModerator/PyModerator). It's still
rather elderly and clunky, with much work to be done, but is
considerably easier to set up than the other extant moderation
software, STUMP. The development version now has support for secure
POP and SMTP connections, making it more likely to work with modern
email providers.
 
The only other way I can think of to lower the barrier to entry is
some sort of hosted moderation platform, but that would be a single
point of failure just like Robomod was. 

 
If I understand correctly, the moderation software just needs to
read mail from the newsgroup's submission email inbox and post
approved messages to a willing NNTP server.

Exactly.
But that still needs somebody who approved that posts.
webstump exists. :-)

In that case you could easily have instances of the same moderation
platform running in different places, similar to front-end websites
like Invidious. If one dies, moderators could make an account on
another identical instance and keep going. If it's open-source and
well written in a long-term stable language (I wouldn't choose Python
on that basis) then it shouldn't need much maintenance even if the
original author departs.

Which still has the issue that there needs to be a process for taking
over. If anybody can do that at any time, there is no real moderation.

The only issue, and I'm not sure if it's an issue, might be the
NNTP servers willing to accept postings from these distributed
neo-Robomod instances. I got the impression from past discussion
that some (most?) NNTP servers don't accept moderators posting
approved articles through them, or require personal requests to
allow it. If all the instances are pointing to the same willing
NNTP server then it becomes another single point of failure.

This is needed to keep the concept of moderated groups. Otherwise
anybody could post messages with an Approved: header.



--
kind regards
Marco

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