Skirv's Moderation

comp.std.announce is a moderated group for announcements of Internet standards and practices. I took it over in 2006; it mostly consists of regular postings of the WWW mailing list and various RFC announcements.

humanities.philosophy.objectivism is a moderated group for the discussion of the philosophy of Objectivism. It's the most successful of my moderation ventures.

News.admin.net-abuse.bulletins is a moderated forum for bulletins of action taken against net abuse. Appropriate subjects include cancellation notices (EMP/ECP, spew, binary, and others), status reports from individual systems concerning action taken against abusers, results of tracking campaigns, "rogue site" declarations, and the like.

News.admin.net-abuse.policy is a moderated forum for discussion of policy and site-management issues related to net abuse. Possible topics include Acceptable Use Policies, what actions should be taken against abusers, discussion of third-party cancel messages, possible actions against abusive sites such as rogue site declarations, discussion of what is and is not net abuse, and so forth.

News.admin.net-abuse.sightings is a forum for reports of sightings of net abuse. It is a robomoderated forum, allowing only properly formatted posts. Followups are required to be set strictly out of the group and into the appropriate group in the news.admin.net-abuse.* hierarchy.

News.admin.announce is a forum for important announcements for news administrators. It is a moderated forum, watched over by a team of moderators for added speed. Possible topics for messages include announcements regarding news transport or browsing software, Frequently Asked Questions lists, announcements of new EMP cancellers, announcements of new cancellation criteria, reports that directly relate to the future of Usenet, reports on legal issues that directly affect news administrators such as the Communications Decency Act, and so forth.

news.admin.moderation is for the discussion of Usenet moderation related topics. I am the technical moderator.

news.announce.newgroups is the main newsgroup for announcements regarding changes in the Big-8 newsgroups - that is, creations and removals. As I am the Chair of the Big-8 Management Board, I am also the guy that posts all of the messages to NAN.

news.groups.proposals is for the discussion of ongoing newsgroup proposals (after a post in news.announce.newgroups). I am an advisory moderator, meaning that I watch what's going on but don't actually do anything official.

rec.arts.comics.reviews is a comic-book reviews newsgroup. I just took this group over on 04 Nov 2005.

rec.games.frp.moderated was a failed attempt at a moderated newsgroup about role-playing games. Now defunct.

was created on Dec 8, 1992, for the discussion of "mecha" and "anime" style combat type games. Or, for the uninformed, giant robot games. This is an unmoderated newsgroup that has discussions of various games in the genres of board, fantasy role-play, individual computer, multi-computer/player, coin-op arcade, and large scale real-time gaming centers that are oriented towards the combat of large humanoid robotic or piloted war machines -- i.e. "Mecha."

rec.toys.transformers.moderated is for the discussion of Hasbro's Transformers toy line, and any related media.

This group is actually mostly dead, but it's a good testbed for Verimod.

talk.current-events is a topical newsgroup for the discussion of the world's events. It is lightly moderated, mostly to allow us to keep out Permaennt Floating Flamewars.

The Big-8 newsgroup hierarchies are managed by the Big-8 Management Board. I am the Chair of that Board.

free.* is hierarchy dedicated to the philosophy of "do whatever you want as long as you're not destroying somebody else's words". I created it back in 1998, and it's actually been fairly popular.

illini.* is my attempt to replace uiuc.* with something useful outside of the campus. I haven't put the necessary effort into it yet.

uiuc.* is an old hierarchy for use by students, staff and faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am its current maintainer, as part of Usenet @ UIUC.

mod.* is an attempt to create a hierarchy of newsgroups that are all moderated. It was connected to the UVM project.