Nan:2024-02-27-mvi-news.admin.technical

From: Usenet Big-8 Management Board <board@big-8.org>
Newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups,news.groups.proposals,news.admin.misc,news.admin.technical
Subject: Moderator Vacancy Investigation: news.admin.technical
Followup-To: news.groups.proposals
Organization: Usenet Big-8 Management Board
Message-ID: <url8ub$ht1$3@reader1.panix.com>
Archive-Name: news.admin.technical


This is a formal Moderator Vacancy Investigation (MVI), begun because
the moderated newsgroup news.admin.technical is not functioning.  This
investigation will set out the reasons for non-function, and may
result in the removal of the group or the selection and installation
of a new moderator.

Followups to this post have been set to news.groups.proposals to
ensure that any resulting discussion can be followed in one place.


RATIONALE:

Attempts to post to the group currently result in a bounce message from 
the ISC moderation relay.

The most recent moderator, Scott Hazen Mueller, has confirmed to the
Board that he is no longer moderating the group.  In July 2018 he had
written to the ISC to inform them that his moderation system would be
shut down.  He had had the group on auto-moderation for at least a
decade and considered it to be effectively defunct.

Apart from automated posts from the moderator, the group's most recent
activity seems to be in 2012, when it had two posts. The group had
sporadic bursts of activity (much of it cross-posted) in 2010, 2009,
and 2008, and seems to have been used somewhat more regularly before
2007.

The Board recently received an inquiry about the status of the group
from someone interested in posting to it.  Given this, and that the
group has historically been used for relevant posts on a topic that is
still relevant today, the Board considers that there may be merit in
opening the group to submissions again.  As an alternative, the group
could be removed with the expectation that posters wishing to discuss
technical news administration would instead use the existing
unmoderated group news.admin.misc.  (Indeed, in a 1995 RFD on
news.admin.technical, it was observed that "news.admin.technical
receives very little traffic" and that "A significant amount of the
technical news administration traffic goes to news.admin.misc"
anyway.)


NEWSGROUPS LINE:

news.admin.technical	Technical aspects of maintaining network news. (Moderated)


HISTORY OF THE GROUP:

news.admin.technical was proposed by Joe Buck
<jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu> in 1992 as part of a larger reorganization
of the news.admin.* hierarchy. (See
<1992Jun2.192019.21687@uunet.uu.net> which is archived at
<https://ftp.isc.org/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/news/news.admin-reorg>.)

news.admin.technical passed its vote 284:25:7 on 4 August 1992, and
Scott Hazen Mueller was appointed moderator. (See
<1992Aug4.183912.19653@uunet.uu.net> which is archived at
<https://ftp.isc.org/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/news/news.admin-reorg>.)

In 1995 there was an RFD to further reorganize the news.admin
hierarchy, which would have involved renaming news.admin.technical to
news.admin.technical.moderated (in order to create a new group
news.admin.technical.help), though this part of the proposal was
dropped before the RFD reached a vote.  (See <3epu0g$idq@rodan.UU.NET>
which is archived at
<https://ftp.isc.org/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/news/news.admin-reorg2>.)


CHARTER AND MODERATION POLICY OF NEWS.ADMIN.TECHNICAL:

This group is dedicated to the technical aspects of maintaining the
netnews environment.  Puzzled by the RFC's?  Trying to diagnose a tricky
problem on your system?  Then post here.

Personal abuse, repetition of things that have been hashed to death
already, and articles more appropriate for news.admin.policy would be
rejected by the moderator with a request to post it elsewhere.


DISTRIBUTION:

news.announce.newgroups
news.groups.proposals
news.admin.misc
news.admin.technical


PROPONENT:

Usenet Big-8 Management Board <board@big-8.org>


PROCEDURE:

Those who wish to comment on this moderator vacancy investigation should
subscribe to news.groups.proposals and participate in the relevant
threads in that newsgroup.

To this end, the followup header of this MVI has been set to
news.groups.proposals.

For more information on the MVI process, please see

http://www.big-8.org/wiki/Moderator_Vacancy_Investigations


CHANGE HISTORY:

2024-02-27 Moderator Vacancy Investigation

-- 
Usenet Big-8 Management Board
https://www.big-8.org/
board@big-8.org