All things in moderation?

[Bob Greene]

As most of you are aware, I changed jobs a while back (early July '90). 
Because of this, I am no longer situated geographically near Rice. This
has resulted in somewhat problematic access to the systems that Sunspots
resides on. The company that I now work for has a "difficult" interface
to the Internet (ie: it's relatively slow from my side of our internal 
network and going to the "distant" side of the Internet from where it is
connected, and relatively difficult to directly pass through). Because
of this, I am not in the position to move -all- of Sunspots with me. I
have moved the distribution point for the Usenet articles to a local 
machine which saves me a lot of time accessing machines at Rice; however,
some work must still be done physically on Rice's machines. 

Sunspots is currently two weeks backlogged. I am working on that backlog
and feel that it will eventually be reduced to something more reasonable.
However, I am not without other tasks and the moderation of Sunspots
takes a non-neglible amount of time to do. I do not feel that I will
be able to guarantee the short turn around time that Sunspots previously 
had any time in the near future.

Because of this, I would once again like to open the age old question of
whether all things, even moderation, should be done in moderation. [:)]
In all seriousness, over the last few months, I have received several
suggestions as to how the task of Sunspots/comp.sys.sun could be broken
apart or reduced. I will excerpt a few short ones below.

I welcome any comments from Sunspots readers concerning what course you
feel would be best to allow Sunspots to meet it's purpose (a TIMELY delivery
of information with a minimum of "noise"). 

Please note that although I have previously vocally opposed un-moderating 
Sunspots, this is now becoming a viable alternative in my mind. Each time
I handle a 2 week old submission and see "URGENT: I need help right away",
that option becomes more real.

[[And here's where I break one of the unspoken rules of net.etiquette and
post private email to the net. My apologies to Mike and Ken, but sometimes
submitters can summarize things better than I can :).]]

***

X-From: cherry at mgh-coffee.Harvard.EDU (Mike Cherry)

Prehaps now is the time to split up comp.sys.sun into sub groups.
Comp.sys.mac has recently done this. The comp.sys.mac group will be
removed on August 1st. Many subgroups were created for the diverse
topics which had all used comp.sys.mac in the past. The majority of the
subgroups are not moderated, however a couple are moderated. I think
this type of change would be good for the following reasons:

1) The sun community is less dependant on a moderator. No one can complain
about turn-around times and once folks got use to the subgroups it would
be easier to pick the information you spend time on. More effective use of
Usenet via subgroups. Less likely to miss something because I was one of 50
messages in the group that day.

2) Moderated subgroups, for example comp.sys.sun.announce, could be used
for important messages. These groups would also be low volume and could
have different moderators.

3) If the digest form to the mailing list is still wanted it could
be produced from a collection of the moderated subgroups and/or selected
articles from the unmoderated groups. A revolving group of moderators could
handle this by just incorporating articles they receive via Usenet. This
mailing list could still be distributed via a single site as well as being
posted to a newsgroup such as comp.sys.sun.digest

***

X-From: km at mathcs.emory.edu (Ken Mandelberg)

I've written to you before to express this opinion, but think its even more
relevant now given the situation you describe in your posting. I feel strongly
that a great deal of the value of comp.sys.sun is the timely turn around that
Usenet groups afford. While I think it was admirable that you were previously
in a position to moderate on a very timely basis, it looks like it is not
very realistic to expect you will be able to continue doing that in your new
job. Frankly, I was both amazed and impressed that you were able to do it so
well in the past, given the volume. I doubt that another moderator, even with
a good internet connection, could do as well.

I propose that consideration be given again to further decoupling the mailing
list from the usenet group. I suggest making the newsgroup an automated
reflector, with moderation done only on the mailing list. At the very least
I suggest you do this for periods when you are not available to moderate.

I know in the past you have disagreed with me on this. If you still do, I think
you should at least bring the issue up for discussion in the group, and have
a vote if there seems to be support for it.