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

In article <684e1bb7@news.ausics.net>, not@telling.you.invalid says...

 
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. 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.

Ah yes, Python. "Let's remove nntplib from the standard library, nobody
uses that any more". *sigh*

I like the idea of an open-source moderation platform. We have
STUMP/WebSTUMP, but it's a pain to set up.

We'd still need volunteers to run instances of the platform, but maybe
that way we'd only need a handful of technically competent people to
provide moderation services to people who are willing to do moderation
work but don't have the skills to set up their own platform.

As, I gather, a closed-source service, Robomod effectively opted in
to being a single point of failure, but I think that approach could
be done much more flexibly.
 
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.
Ideally they'd all be pointing to different NNTP servers (_ideally_
many instances would be run by the same people who run those NNTP
servers).

Panix and Eternal September are willing to allow posting of approved
articles, if the user can show they have a legit reason. If anyone knows
of other NNTP providers that will grant this permission, please let us
know, it's good to have more options we can recommend to potential
moderators.

Rayner