Re: Young people peering

On 04/20/2024 12:04 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:

Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> writes:

On 20.04.2024 um 17:42 Uhr The Bjornsdottirs - Lightning wrote:

>

When I come across Usenet admins, they cannot clearly say that they
will ban and filter anyone they come across committing harassment,
nor that they will institute a code of conduct which is actively
antifascist, because the values of the network are not actively
antifascist and in fact tend towards calling antifascists whiners.

>

This is something every newsmaster can decide himself.

>
Sort of.  The NNTP and netnews protocols have exceptionally poor support
for moderation compared to just about any other message board software,
since essentially everything else was designed after NNTP and netnews and
learned from its shortcomings.
>
You can insert an extremely heavy moderation step in front of all traffic
(but only for private groups or if you can reach an agreement with your
transitive peers), but the protocol is completely insecure, and while
there are patchwork solutions to that, you have to implement them
yourself.  Or you have to rely on filtering, which is a very poor
moderation strategy that requires endless arms races with people trying to
bypass it.
>
And all of the more advanced tools available in newer protocols simply
aren't there (for better or worse; Usenet people usually don't like most
of these, but people running other types of message board systems use them
heavily): migrating messages to different threads, closing threads, user
authentication and all the things that come with that such as poster bans
or pre-moderation for new users but not established users, etc.  About the
only thing you can do is delete the message off your server after the
fact, and the tools for doing that are very primitive.  You can simulate
some of this by writing a whole pile of custom software that sits in the
pre-moderation path, but now you've signed on for the project of writing a
moderation system from scratch.  The protocol and existing software base
are doing essentially nothing for you.
>
A lot of people prefer the Usenet model for various reasons, and that's
fine, that's something people can argue about.  But Usenet's moderation
and filtering facilities are staggeringly primitive, and if those are a
priority for you, Usenet is a bad technology choice and you should use
something else.
>

Hello good sir, one thing I'd like to figure out is cleanfeed with
regards to the reference implementation in Perl and with regards to
extracting out the ruleset and making it so the same rules can be
evaluated according to a usual sort of cleanfeed convention.
It's similar with the config files of INND, with regards to that
they are normative, in a sense, and should have a sort of reference
implementation.
The rather esoteric moderation tools or as with respect to control
band and trust networks, has that it really is a great sort of invisible
hand in effect, that one hopes would be sort of stood up as modernizable.
Perhaps it you told the young people that Usenet was sort of like a
blockchain, of email, maybe that would make more sense.
About modernization, there's the client protocol which needs no
modernization, given that it has TLS and SASL pretty much, though
one might aver it would be something to "make a normative sort of
HTTP protocol about it", yet really NNTP is more aligned with Email
than Hypertext, then though about the server or compeer protocols,
and about the agreements and traditions in trust, your advice and
requirements about these kinds of things would be very appreciated,
with regards to context of the system and its surrounds and purpose.