[Foundation-l] Use of moderation

[John Vandenberg]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Tim Starling<tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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.

I agree.  The mozilla newsgroups are a good example.

http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?sel=usenet%3Dmozilla

Another benefit is that the mailing list archives can be easily moved
to the news server, keeping the history intact.

> 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/

Google groups is a web gateway to NNTP.  I've not tried it from a
mobile, but I expect it would be usable.

--
John Vandenberg