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  • Moderator Vacancy Investigation: news.admin.technical

    From Usenet Big-8 Management Board@21:1/5 to All on Tue Feb 27 13:18:09 2024
    XPost: news.groups.proposals, news.announce.newgroups, news.admin.technical

    This is a formal Moderator Vacancy Investigation (MVI), begun because
    the moderated newsgroup news.admin.technical is not functioning. This investigation will set out the reasons for non-function, and may
    result in the removal of the group or the selection and installation
    of a new moderator.

    Followups to this post have been set to news.groups.proposals to
    ensure that any resulting discussion can be followed in one place.


    RATIONALE:

    Attempts to post to the group currently result in a bounce message from
    the ISC moderation relay.

    The most recent moderator, Scott Hazen Mueller, has confirmed to the
    Board that he is no longer moderating the group. In July 2018 he had
    written to the ISC to inform them that his moderation system would be
    shut down. He had had the group on auto-moderation for at least a
    decade and considered it to be effectively defunct.

    Apart from automated posts from the moderator, the group's most recent
    activity seems to be in 2012, when it had two posts. The group had
    sporadic bursts of activity (much of it cross-posted) in 2010, 2009,
    and 2008, and seems to have been used somewhat more regularly before
    2007.

    The Board recently received an inquiry about the status of the group
    from someone interested in posting to it. Given this, and that the
    group has historically been used for relevant posts on a topic that is
    still relevant today, the Board considers that there may be merit in
    opening the group to submissions again. As an alternative, the group
    could be removed with the expectation that posters wishing to discuss
    technical news administration would instead use the existing
    unmoderated group news.admin.misc. (Indeed, in a 1995 RFD on news.admin.technical, it was observed that "news.admin.technical
    receives very little traffic" and that "A significant amount of the
    technical news administration traffic goes to news.admin.misc"
    anyway.)


    NEWSGROUPS LINE:

    news.admin.technical Technical aspects of maintaining network news. (Moderated)


    HISTORY OF THE GROUP:

    news.admin.technical was proposed by Joe Buck
    <jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu> in 1992 as part of a larger reorganization
    of the news.admin.* hierarchy. (See
    <1992Jun2.192019.21687@uunet.uu.net> which is archived at <https://ftp.isc.org/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/news/news.admin-reorg>.)

    news.admin.technical passed its vote 284:25:7 on 4 August 1992, and
    Scott Hazen Mueller was appointed moderator. (See <1992Aug4.183912.19653@uunet.uu.net> which is archived at <https://ftp.isc.org/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/news/news.admin-reorg>.)

    In 1995 there was an RFD to further reorganize the news.admin
    hierarchy, which would have involved renaming news.admin.technical to news.admin.technical.moderated (in order to create a new group news.admin.technical.help), though this part of the proposal was
    dropped before the RFD reached a vote. (See <3epu0g$idq@rodan.UU.NET>
    which is archived at <https://ftp.isc.org/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/news/news.admin-reorg2>.)


    CHARTER AND MODERATION POLICY OF NEWS.ADMIN.TECHNICAL:

    This group is dedicated to the technical aspects of maintaining the
    netnews environment. Puzzled by the RFC's? Trying to diagnose a tricky problem on your system? Then post here.

    Personal abuse, repetition of things that have been hashed to death
    already, and articles more appropriate for news.admin.policy would be
    rejected by the moderator with a request to post it elsewhere.


    DISTRIBUTION:

    news.announce.newgroups
    news.groups.proposals
    news.admin.misc
    news.admin.technical


    PROPONENT:

    Usenet Big-8 Management Board <board@big-8.org>


    PROCEDURE:

    Those who wish to comment on this moderator vacancy investigation should subscribe to news.groups.proposals and participate in the relevant
    threads in that newsgroup.

    To this end, the followup header of this MVI has been set to news.groups.proposals.

    For more information on the MVI process, please see

    http://www.big-8.org/wiki/Moderator_Vacancy_Investigations


    CHANGE HISTORY:

    2024-02-27 Moderator Vacancy Investigation

    --
    Usenet Big-8 Management Board
    https://www.big-8.org/
    board@big-8.org

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