From: IN%"gbroiles@netbox.com" "Greg Broiles" 4-FEB-1997 14:55:18.91

But my impression is that many moderation opponents would also be opponents of a move to Usenet. Perhaps I'm wrong. But Usenet offers precisely what many people claim we must have for the list to be viable, e.g., uncontrolled/uncontrollable distribution and messaging. So I'm curious about whether or not the proponents of an open, uncontrolled list really want it to be *that* open and uncontrolled. In the past, there's been strong opposition to that. But it's possible that most of the people who had strong feelings about not wanting to be subjected to the downside of Usenet have already left the list.

(And if the current opponents of moderation don't want to see the list be quite that open, I think what we're arguing about here is not "censorship v. no censorship" but "what degree of censorship do we want? one lump, or two?", which pretty much eliminates anyone's claim to have a moral high ground from which to argue.)

Umm... there's a difference. Moderation is control by a _person_; not moving to Usenet is control by nobody except how things happen to be set up.

The good side I see to a move to Usenet is that it lets people use the comparatively better tools for managing messages - e.g., NoCeM, threading, nn (whose killfiles will kill by thread, author, regexp, and can be time limited so you can easily give annoying people a 30-day 'timeout' and see if they're still a kook later on), AltaVista and DejaNews archiving/searching, and server architecture that's designed to cope with storing/indexing many messages.

Hmm... since both you and Bill Stewart are pointing out various advantageous things about Usenet, I may need to retract my previous statement that mail fitering is better. On the other hand, other people have mentioned the susceptibility of email to write-your-own filtering and other processing. (For instance, I've got a project that needs cypherpunks (and other controversial groups) to be on mailing lists instead of (or at least as well as) news servers to work right.) Is there a full-scale equivalent of procmail for Usenet, including functions like shunting messages to programs et al?

The down side is that Usenet is more or less a sewer these days, and some of it's bound to spill over.

Quite. -Allen