Nuxx:MPG.264536f348d5c73398973f@news.zen.co.uk

Path: num2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!num1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!number.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!nx01.iad01.newshosting.com!newshosting.com!feeder.ecngs.de!ecngs!feeder2.ecngs.de!zen.net.uk!hamilton.zen.co.uk!reader02.news.zen.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID:  From: Guy Cuthbertson  Newsgroups: uk.net.news.moderation Subject: Re: Block List Notification Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:51:03 +0100 References:  <83vlpfFl14U1@mid.individual.net> <840h8iFsefU1@mid.individual.net>  Lines: 54 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit User-Agent: MicroPlanet-Gravity/2.9.14 X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS 100430-0, 30/04/2010), Outbound message X-Antivirus-Status: Clean Organization: Zen Internet NNTP-Posting-Host: 0e6c8b69.news.zen.co.uk X-Trace: DXC=o691>=Re@P;FiQn`d_;:_;YjZGX^207P;`:oIe=T3W02BH4535cfTO0ZU20H@?LHX1, ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk says... > > My experience is that trying to explain things here doesn't always > work very well. Most of the people posting here about urcm's > moderation have not been reading urcm (which if you look at the group > itself is is a healthy functioning well), and have not had the > experience of the cesspit that was (and is) urc.

Doesn't seem like a cesspit to me. It's a fair bit busier than URCM at the moment as well. I suppose one's assessment of which group is "better" depends a lot on one's tolerance of those who disagree with them: I can see how someone who didn't like to read opposing opinions would prefer URCM (assuming that their own opinions coincided with those "allowed" in URCM).

> If a particular poster posts many borderline and unacceptable messages > (as might be evidenced, for example, by a very high rejection rate - > in the most recent case >50%), then even the ones that we approve are > likely to be borderline. Whereas one annoying posting in a while is > something the group's users will put up with, if it's constantly the > same person posting the same kind of stuff - annoying but not quite > rejectionworthy in isolation - that annoyance adds up, and the users > rightly wonder why we aren't doing our job.

But it's not reasonable to get annoyed by opposing opinions in themselves. It's not reasonable to get annoyed by a poster pointing out inconvenient truths. Yet we have had frequent examples of URCM readers (and sometimes even moderators) exhibiting this behaviour. Just because a group of users becomes more and more annoyed by someone's posts, it doesn't necessarily make that annoyance even slightly justifiable, especially when that group of users has shown themselves to be unreasonable in other ways (e.g. rabidly and unreservedly supporting anti-car measures no matter what their side effects are shown to be).

I'm sorry but I really think you've shot yourselves in the foot big time by banning Judith just as things were finally looking like they might settle down. It was utterly unnecessary and now you seem to have lost the support of pretty much everyone on UNNM except Chapman and Clive George (and even he has suddenly gone very quiet). If you were fed up with the same old group of nutjobs sending whinging emails to the moderators every time Judith pointed out a truth that they didn't like, then you should have either ignored them or told them to stop their whinging, instead of thinking "Sod it, it's easiest just to capitulate and block Judith". As you've no doubt discovered, it hasn't been easiest at all.

Please rescind the block, for the sake of pretty much everyone, and most definitely URCM itself as a healthy, respected newsgroup. As others have said, a uk.* newsgroup is not the place for a private club where only the "right" people and opinions are welcome. The usenet "old hands" on here seem pretty unanimous that you've made a glaring error...are you sure you don't want to take their advice while you still can?