At 01:45 PM 7/11/95 -0500, Michael James Gebis wrote:

Specifically, I was thinking along the lines of a newsgroup where only selected individuals are able to post, but anybody who wants to can read the group. However, the "selected individuals" could fall into several categories.

Not hard to implement things like this. With the current non-cryptoized moderation system, anybody can post to a moderated group by putting an "Approved:" header line on their article. And articles can be cancelled by anyone who wants to forge an cancel, so articles with forged approvals can be cancelmoosed away if people want. You could set up a cancelbot that trashes any article that doesn't have the magic words from the FAQ Approved: Squeamish Ossifrage in the header, or doesn't have the right digital signature in the approvals, where you've only given teh keys to the Moderation Cabal. Or, for a system where mail has to go to a moderator first, similar to the current mail-to-moderator posting method, you could set up a mail-pool for the moderator's address, that sends each article out to 1..N of the moderators (e.g. to whoever's on duty today, or everybody, or a random k of the moderators for load-sharing), who could then post them. If you want a mailing-list approach, they're easier - just send your mailing list through procmail on the mailhost, and set it up to accept/reject/etc. whoever your list policy wants. If somebody comes out with D News, the crypto-cancel-based system, it can use a digital signature system like RIPEM-SIG (which is exportable) or some equivalent we can build out of PGP after the PGP 3.0 toolkit becomes available. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com