X-Message-Number: 876
Date: 03 Jun 92 03:39:49 EDT
From: Bob Smart <>
Subject: CRYONICS: Moderation

I personally would like to know what the super-persuasive argument against
having a moderated newsgroup was.  Certainly there ARE moderated groups, and
in view of the enormous heat that gets liberated every time the subject of
cryonics arises, a moderated group for us sounds like a damn fine idea to
me still.
 
Also, I'd like to put in my vote now to stay away from *.life-ext.* for this
project.  I think the category is overbroad and too likely to be
appropriated for debates about vitamins and exercise.  If we have a group
whose name contains "cryonics," and we choose to allow posts about other
life-extension technologies, well and good...but when the topics stray too
far from the long-term extensions I think most of us are interested in (and
which aren't well-received in other obvious places, like sci.med*) we have
impeccable grounds for pruning them.  People who want to talk about vitamins
can probably do so in other sci.* groups; it would push me to the brink of
aneurism to see "get that cryonics crap out of our newsgroup" appear in a
*.life-ext* group after everybody's forgotten how and why the group was
created in the first place.  So call me atavistic, call me territorial...but
call the group sci.*cryonics*.
 
Actually, I guess the heat production shouldn't come as such a surprise; we
ARE talking about refrigeration....
 
[ Bob, I admit it, I was a bit too coy in my description of why I dropped
  the idea to moderate the USENET cryonics news group.  Actually, I was
  beginning to reach that conclusion (due to work load and potential
  burn out, etc.) anyway, but what really solidified it for me was when
  the AT&T news machine postmaster told me that, for legal liability reasons,
  nobody is allowed to moderate a USENET cryonics news group from the AT&T
  news machines.
  As for flame wars in an unmoderated news group, that is a possibility,
  but I do not expect it to be on the scale of the sci.med cryonics debates
  because, in a sense, we were invading their "turf" by posting
  cryonics-related messages in sci.med.  Also, if a flame war somehow
  erupts in a sci.*cryonics* news group, those flames can be filtered
  out of the cryonics mailing list easily enough and for those people
  reading the USENET news group, we have several techniques available
  to us for filtering out tiresome threads or for even influencing
  (although not controlling) the flamers and flame war.  Of course,
  another method of handling flame wars is by posting a LOT of well-written
  articles keeping us up-to-date on research in cryobiology, biochemistry
  of memory, etc. to keep the focus on topics important to cryonics. - KQB ]

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