Re: the life of moderators

• Freedom of Speech on the internet by Chris morrow, 1/29/99
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    • the life of a list moderators by John, 2/7/99
      
      

Hello!

Do you really think the life of a moderator is fascinating? Ohh, my godness! I have a huge collection of humorous one-liners about moderators' life... for example, - "I had a life once, now I moderate..." "If you have enough friends, become a moderator"... "It's a tough job, but someone gotta do it - Fidonet moderator"... "Darn...I thought being a moderator was a hobby"...

And they are funny, but definitely right :) So... I moderate 4 FIDONet conferences, and one of them was created by me. A lifestyle? Well, I don't see any changes. If you are going to moderate a FIDONet conference, be prepared for receiving a lot of flames, so follow the gold rule of Fidonet Policy: "Do not annoy, do not be easily annoyed". Yes, a lot of flames, if some subscribers of your conference would be offended by your politics (For example, in RU.INTERNET is strongly forbidden to search for cracks and pornography and post pornographic URLs. So people who are crazy about that can flame you a lot. But, OTOH, FIDONet moderators have a lot of support from *EC's (echomail coordinators); and, the Echo Policy is always on our side. It helps a lot.

You will get many messages with thanks from people who like your conference, if you will rule it carefully and will be justice. It's especially beautiful, when your subscribers will be your friends and will share your ideas.

You need also to care about technical details of conference distribution. Moderating of mailing list or web-forum can't be even compared with that! What is web-forum? One page and a bunch of scripts. What is a mailing list? Majordomo or Listserv will do it for you. What is Fidonet? The Fidonet is Fidonet. You will write to Network coordinators and nodes, to uplinks and downlinks, asking them about your conference. You will establish new links between nodes and look for new point addresses for people who want your echo, but can't get it from their sysops. You will explain to people, how to reach your echo via WWW, via Usenet, via FIDO and even via BBS'es.... It's not very easy. But it's interesting. It's a beauty of echo moderators' life...

I'm a moderator of RU.COMPUTER.LIFE (available in Usenet as news://fido7.ru.computer.life, - echo about computer-related fiction and main meeting place for russian nerds and geeks - 50-100 msg/day :) ; and, co-moderator of three huge conferences RU.INTERNET (500 messages/day sometime!), RU.INTERNET.WWW and RU.INTERNET.CHAINIK ( chainik ~= newbie, dummy -for new Internet users)... if you know russian language, you're welcomed here... :)

Tatiana Matveeva / inity@bigfoot.com /
http://inity.junik.lv

• re: advice for moderators by John, 2/13/99