Re: moderation of abuse

From: Will Hartung (willh_at_msoft.com)
Date: 02/04/04 

Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 10:36:03 -0800

"Henrik Motakef" <usenet-reply@henrik-motakef.de> wrote in message
news:x7r7xbhsfe.fsf@crocket.internal.henrik-motakef.de...

> Both a newbie-friendlier discussion style and a weekly FAQ posting do
> not depend on a new newsgroup. The former could be enforced by
> enforced by creating a moderated ng, but personally I don't think that
> it's worth it. The latter could be done by anyone who cares by simply
> posting it, and while many newbies won't read it anyway, it surely
> wouldn't do any harm.

A moderated group would simply take on the flavor of the moderators. If you
like that flavor, you like the group, if you don't, well, your stuck. Just
like now.

A newbie newsgroup would be dead quiet, as basically newbies would live
there. Then, in Google you'll see a zillion single post questions with no
answers, because they're all newbies and don't know the answers. The
"oldbies" wouldn't necessarily hang around there because it's mostly a one
way interchange.

There seems to be this feeling that the newsgroup name defines the
atmosphere of a newsgroup, and not the people participating in it. I
disagree.

> A simple thing to do would be a frequent posting that just points to
> the various existing FAQs, the cl-cookbook, cliki pages like
> alu.cliki.net/Implementations and/or
> http://www.cliki.net/Common%20Lisp%20implementation etc. Over time,
> that could evolve into a proper FAQ by integrating information from
> these sources as needed.

You mean like this one?

Cliki is all over this newsgroup. If someone sits and lurks here for a day
or two, inevitably someone will mention the name "Cliki", or even a link.

Anyone even REMOTELY curious will Google or click the Cliki, and voila. We
need a frequent "generic" Cliki post as much as we need a frequent Google
post. And anyone who posts "What is Cliki" has pretty much immediately
disqualified themselves as a Net Citizen. Barring a 12 year old in their
first week on the internet who just happened to be captivated by the threads
in c.l.l, "What is Cliki" style questions are simply inappropriate here in
this day and age.

Google has freed USENET from a lot of these issues simply because it's beome
the hive mind and Net dump. Why wait for a newsgroup FAQ posting when LISP
FAQ in Google gets you the (an) answer that much faster?

Some concepts are difficult to query on, but many are not, and can be
resolved through archives and web searches. Most are much more willing to
answer questions that someone has not found the answer too before coming to
c.l.l.

Just like any other newsgroup, new participants needs simply spend a couple
of days (or read a couple of days on Google) to get the flavor and links to
resources that can be used before they ask anything.

If anything, a consolidated, updated, Lisp FAQ, perhaps posted on Cliki or
ALU, would help resolve numerous issues. The goal being that whenever
someone types "LISP FAQ", in a search engine, it should be near the top of
the results list. So, feel free to take that project on.

Regards,

Will Hartung
(willh@msoft.com)

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