Nuxx:MPG.27a046038ab6b79898987b@news.zen.co.uk

Path: num2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!num1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!number.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!newsfeed01.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!dedekind.zen.co.uk!zen.net.uk!hamilton.zen.co.uk!shaftesbury.zen.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID:  From: Nuxx Bar  Newsgroups: uk.net.news.moderation Subject: Thanks to uk.religion.christian Moderators Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:51:53 -0000 Lines: 38 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit User-Agent: MicroPlanet-Gravity/2.9.14 Organization: Zen Internet NNTP-Posting-Host: bdda98fe.news.zen.co.uk X-Trace: DXC=SHcY?8OMlDg:V^i7Zf86Zdnok4Z\<mH4ihDU:2=XKPkhbP`LI1N1b:fEn<S9LLeaZmFoYXJNjL7Tm X-Complaints-To: abuse@zen.co.uk Bytes: 3285 Xref: perfectly-safe.chapmancentral.co.uk uk.net.news.moderation:36404

I have made a few posts to uk.religion.christian lately, and have been impressed by the tolerant and reasonable attitude that the moderators display. UKRC is a good example of how a moderated newsgroup should be.

Christianity and associated topics have the potential to be at least as controversial as cycling-related topics, if not a good deal more so. Indeed, the last few days on UKRC have seen a wide spread of opinions on some important issues which many people take extremely seriously. Yet the vast majority of manually moderated posts are approved. And guess what? The sky hasn't fallen in, and the group is a lively and vibrant one. If (shock horror) an opinion is posted that someone doesn't agree with, they say why, and an interesting discussion ensues. Is that not the whole point of usenet? Why have a newsgroup at all if you're just going to sanitise what's posted to the extent that all approved posts are in agreement about the important stuff?

And there's the nub of the matter: UKRC was created to encourage discussion on Christianity-related issues, with moderation "just in case", while URCM was created to suppress, limit and censor cycling debate. The latter is not a real newsgroup: it's a place where people of a certain feeble mindset can kid themselves that they're right about particular issues while sparing themselves the inconvenience of actually having to show it by outdebating their opponents. If UKRC was run like URCM then non-Christians would constantly be having their posts rejected for spurious "reasons". But it's not, because unlike the URCM moderators, the UKRC moderators are confident enough that their opinions are correct that they don't feel the need to "cheat" by abusing their powers to ensure they never lose any debates.

So thank you to the UKRC moderators for doing a good job, and proving what most of us knew: it's almost never truly necessary to reject usenet posts, even on controversial subjects, and moderation should be a lightly used safety net rather than a way of shaping and pruning every remotely controversial discussion. The URCM moderators are deeply insecure about whether they're really right about helmets etc, which is why they killfiled opposing arguments on URC, and they now reject them on URCM. UKRC shows categorically that such rejections aren't needed to run a decent newsgroup.