Dick Adams wrote:
In my rarely humble opinion, alt.home.repair is the best
of the USENET newsgroups. Unfortunately, it suffers from
spam and other worthless stuff. Is it time to implement
robo-moderation?

To: Dick Adams

You started this thread, and I wrote the following in response. Any chance
that you will follow up on your original post with any additional
information etc. in response to what I and/or others wrote? Thanks.

Here's what I wrote:

I think that's an interesting question, and I have some thoughts and
questions of my own regarding the idea.

How difficult would it be to create an alt.home.repair.moderated newsgroup?
How is that done? And, if I were to set up a similar moderated newsgroup
(not related to alt.home.repair), with me as one of the moderators, where
could I find out about getting the robo-moderation software you mentioned
and how to set it up and use it?

Overall, I agree that this alt.home.repair newsgroup is one of the best
Usenet newsgroups around. I use it all the time along with a very few
others. I have seen other newsgroups get overrun with nonsense to the point
that either the newsgroup rarely has any on-point posts among the mass of
off-topic posts (such at rec.boats that I used to frequent), or they get
completely annihilated by spammers such as at the
alt.social-security-disability newsgroup (that one used to be great but got
killed off by some relentless psycho). And, I see a trend here of more and
more people posting political opinions, off-topic articles, etc. and I
wonder if eventually this group will go the way of groups like rec.boats.
Some of the people who post political and off-topic opinion crap at
rec.boats and help make it become useless are posting the same stuff here
more and more.

I do use Misc.Taxes.Moderated and Misc.Legal.Moderated from time to time.
They are excellent in the sense that there is no crap on either group. But,
robo-moderation or not, the reality is that it takes a long time for new
posts to appear on those groups -- often a few days or more. I know that
you are a volunteer moderator there, and your criteria regarding moderation
seems to work well. But, for some reason, new posts only appear every few
days or so. That makes me think that the robo-moderation part isn't working
well. I only post anonymously on any newsgroups, and many others do the
same. Maybe that's why the robo-moderation doesn't work, meaning maybe
anonymous posters like me can't get "whitelisted" -- I don't know.

Can the robo-moderation software for any newsgroup be set up so that all
posts are whitelisted until there is a problem poster, and then only the
problem poster get blacklisted and moderated before their posts go through?
And, can the robo-moderation software be set up to moderate/blacklist
certain MAC ID numbers rather than just the poster's username and/or email
address? That way, people who just keep changing their name to post
complete sick and malicious crap from the same computer would get
automatically blacklisted.

Thanks. I look forward to your reply and feedback.