From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Thu May 09 2002 - 14:10:27 CDT
Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net> writes:
> It's unpopular with moderators simply because it is unfamiliar and
> doesn't fit their current procedures, not because there is anything
> fundamentally wrong with it. Any transition of this sort is going to be
> annoying when it happens, but that doesn't translate to *sustained*
> unpopularity, which would be a much more serious concern.
My concern here is not with the technical concept, which I think is the
right approach and something that needs to happen eventually, but with the
timing of this and the lack of help for moderators. Most moderation
software currently in use is ad hoc, cobbled together in someone's spare
time, unmaintained, and often running on autopilot. This change will
break everyone's software. Who's going to fix it?
Moderation on Usenet has enough problems right now that this worries me.
At the least, it would be nice to see someone put the work into the top,
say, four moderation packages (maybe STUMP, James Logajan's software,
Brian Edmond's software, and Jay Denebeim's software) to make them handle
this format *before* anyone advocates anyone use it.
And there's another real problem here, namely that quite a lot of
moderators are not technically sophisticated and many of them are using
procedures such as Chris Gunn's documentation for Forte Agent users to
just manually add an Approved header to an article. I don't know how this
is going to affect them and whether it will make their job any harder;
elevating body content to the headers is trivial in most Unix clients
which use a unified editing buffer, but is insanely difficult in most
Windows clients which separate the headers from the body entirely and
often don't let you edit most of the headers.
Just being the right technical move is a good first step, but it's not
sufficient. Has anyone done a serious analysis of the impact and
implications? Is there a coherent transition plan in place apart from
"eventually some site will start doing this and then all the moderators
will have to fix their software; I think it's probably easy and wish them
luck with that"?
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>