[Foundation-l] Use of moderation

[Tim Starling]

Austin Hair wrote:
> My ideal, personally, is something more like nntp--and while I'm
> perfectly happy to turn over the list to some other technology, I
> don't know that this is the magic solution, and I agree with Tim that
> it risks killing what good we do have with the existing methods.

I like NNTP too. It has postmoderation, so while you might not be able
to authenticate posts, you can at least cancel any that fall outside
the rules. It's an open standard which predates the web, and lots of
tools and clients have been developed over the years to make use of
its many features. It has built-in support for distribution and
mirroring. It integrates well with email and lots of organisations run
bidirectional gateways.

However, it has largely been forgotten. Most internet users have never
heard of it and they don't know how to read it, except when they're
shown a web gateway. Mobile developers have apparently never heard of
it either, despite the fact that its lightweight nature and time-worn
support for low-memory systems should make it a perfect fit.

For postmoderation to work, most people would have to be using NNTP
directly, or a web gateway, instead of an email gateway. We'd have to
evangelise the clients, say in a footer in outgoing emails.

A quick google search turns up the following NNTP clients for mobile
platforms:

Java: http://mobilenews.sourceforge.net/
iPhone: http://inewsgroup.googlecode.com/
Windows: http://www.qusnetsoft.ru/

-- Tim Starling