Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 23:02:06 06/18/98
I haven't asked my fellow moderators if I should write this post, so please blame me if it's dumb or wrong to write this post. ----------- Per capita alcohol consumption is several liters per year, but there are people out there who try to do their year's worth in a few hours, then they get on the net and do all kinds of strange things including writing obscene and/or incoherent things in this group. At least I hope this is what happens, because I would hate to think that someone writes this stuff while sober. This has happened a couple of times, and these posts have been deleted rather quickly. I guess the idea is to get rid of the stuff before it is responded to. We had one guy write two of these today. I was actually reading the group at the time, but it was gone so fast that I didn't see it, and when I got to my email a half-hour or so later, there was mail from Steven and Don, who were trying to figure out how to handle this, because I am supposedly "on call", and I hadn't noticed this and asked for its removal before they saw it. I don't have any problem with this kind of thing going away, but I can iimagine that there would be some fear amongst some people that moderators would delete posts that contained unpopular opinions rather than no opinions (merely epithets or whatever). Personally, I don't think that stuff should be quickly erased unless it really does contain no semantic content. An example of one that I think should be erased is the one that was titled "F--- you", and the content was "No, really, f--- you". An example of what I don't think should be erased is a post where someone accuses someone else of using a killer book, even though this has been denied and is almost certainly false. I think that kind of thing can be nasty, unpleasant, and repetitive, and someone might get warned to calm down, but the post shouldn't be deleted. There is obvious potential for gray areas, such as a severely hacked off customer raving for a few lines about some awful thing that he thinks the company did to him. I would feel bad about leaving this kind of thing in, but I think that I'd have to, and hope that it got sorted out in the responses. I can imagine another moderator might feel like deleting it, however. I would like to know if anyone thinks that this sort of express spam removal might be a problem, and hear if anyone has any ideas about how this should be handled, so as to avoid possible problems. 1) Do folks think that it is OK for the moderators to summarily remove stuff with no semantic content? What happened today is that Steve removed it after consulting with Don, but he sent the post on to Amir and I, and offered to put it back if we objected. 2) Does anyone really really want to see this stuff, and if so, should we ask Steve to set up a "censored" mailing list, so people can get a chance to see what is being culled from the group? I assume that we all have enough integrity to respond properly if someone brings up a good objection to deletion of something, and would put it back. Any other ideas? bruce
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