Subject: 2nd RFD: soc.culture.japan.moderated moderated From: shimpei@leland.stanford.edu (Shimpei Yamashita) Date: 1996/03/26 Newsgroups: news.groups REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD) moderated group soc.culture.japan.moderated This is a the second formal Request For Discussion for the creation of a moderated group soc.culture.japan.moderated. This is not a Call For Votes. Do not vote now. Procedural details are at the end of this document. Changes from the previous RFD: No changes (aside from a few change in wordings). No CFV was submitted for the previous RFD because we could not find a computer on which to run the moderator bot before the RFD expired. A volunteer has since gracefully stepped forward and offered us use of his machine. Newsgroups Line: soc.culture.japan.moderated Moderated discussion of Japanese culture. (Moderated) RATIONALE: soc.culture.japan.moderated soc.culture.japan (scj) presently receives over 200 posts per day. Many of these posts are off-topic, and many more are crossposted flame wars that bring no fruitful discussions and distract the readership as a whole from the threads that do invite good discussion. Newsreaders with good killfile mechanisms can reduce the noise to some extent; however, the speed at which new irrelevant threads are created in recent days can exhaust even the most prolific killfile writers. To help solve this problem, we propose the creation of a new newsgroup soc.culture.japan.moderated (scjm). Note that this is not an attempt to moderate scj; scj will remain active and unmoderated after the creation of scjm. Because of the high traffic expected in the group, a computer program will moderate most of the traffic in scjm. The program will reject all crossposts except to soc.culture.japan and subject all new posters to human approval; we expect that these measures alone will reduce noise significantly. The program may reject forward to the moderators those articles that fall under certain criteria they determine (see MODERATION POLICY). Those wishing to carry on a cross-discussion with other newsgroups are still welcome to do so in soc.culture.japan. CHARTER: soc.culture.japan.moderated soc.culture.japan.moderated is for discussion of Japanese culture. Appropriate topics include, but are not limited to: Living and traveling in Japan; Japanese politics, history, religion, or current events; and Japanese entertainment (such as anime, manga, or pop music). Note: A frequent source of noise in soc.culture.japan is Japan's involvement in World War II and its consequences. This topic is within the scope of scjm, and posts on this topic are welcome; however, posters are encouraged to keep their posts rational and informative. In addition, moderators will reserve the right to ask the posters to post summaries of their opinions on a certain thread, and then cut off the thread for some length of time (on order of two weeks or so). Inappropriate topics include: Topics not involving Japan. Topics involving ethnic Japanese people that have no direct connection to Japan or Japanese culture. (For example, Lance Ito being Japanese American does not make the OJ Simpson trial an appropriate topic.) Commercial, wanted, forsale, or personal ads. Presently ads contribute significantly to the noise in soc.culture.japan. Most of these ads have other, more relevant newsgroups such as misc.marketplace.* and alt.personals, and therefore should not be tolerated even in scj, much less in scjm. We do recognize, however, the utility of posting ads for jobs pertaining to Japan, and will make an exception for a weekly digest of job ads submitted by the readership and compiled by volunteers. All crossposts except to soc.culture.japan. This exception is made to prevent the scjm readership from becoming isolated from the scj readers who elect to stay in the unmoderated forum. Note that such crossposts are subject to the same moderation standards as all other posts to scjm, but anyone whose posts are rejected can repost them in scj alone and continue discussion. Flamebaits, or posts designed specifically to elicit angry responses. We recognize that the distinction between flamebaits and harsh posts is a subjective one. The moderators will use their best judgment to decide whether a flamebait will generate enough noise to warrant being rejected. Moderation Policy: Most of the moderation will be done by a computer software. The functions of the software will be to: 1) reject all crossposts except to soc.culture.japan. (It will have to make an exception for the FAQ, which will be crossposted to soc.culture.japan, news.answers and soc.answers.) 2) apply filters defined by the moderators to the posts to see if they fall under certain categories (defined below). If so, the posts are forwarded to the moderators for review. 3) check the poster name against a list of people who have already posted to groups (and approved by the moderators). If the name is on the list and it did not match the filters, the submission is posted automatically. Submissions by new posters are reviewed by human moderators for approval; this is done to reduce the number of trollers and also to give a chance for everyone interested in scjm to become familiar with the moderation process. (For the latter purpose, a copy of the scj.* FAQ and a scjm FAQ outlining the moderation policy will be mailed to all new posters.) If a post is marked for human approval, it is forwarded to the moderation team for review. We plan to reduce turnaround time by having the moderators log in to a server and approve articles deposited on that server as their schedules allow. The server will also keep a log of each moderators' activities, and post a summary periodically to allow the readership to ensure that the moderators are acting in a fair manner. If the moderators agree that a certain topic has degenerated to the point where further discussion on scjm may be detrimental to the mission of the group, then a filter will be installed on the computer program to allow human moderation of the thread; in extreme cases, the moderators may even elect to reject the thread automatically. Similarly, if a poster repeatedly commits abuse or acts contrary to the charter, his name may be placed in a filter so that all of his posts are subject to human review. In extreme cases, the moderators may ban the poster altogether for a limited time not exceeding two months. All such actions by the moderators must appear in the periodical report mentioned in the previous paragraph. In particular, the list of monitored and banned individuals must be available. There should be at least five moderators at any given time; it should go below that number only if the moderation team feels that no qualified individual has contacted them to volunteer. The team is responsible for picking replacements for any moderators who decide to leave the team. Mike Fester has tentatively agreed to write the moderation program. Shimpei Yamashita has tentatively agreed to provide a server for the program. END CHARTER. MODERATOR INFO: soc.culture.japan.moderated Moderator: Mike Fester Moderator: Akira Ijuin Moderator: Shimpei Yamashita At least two more to be named END MODERATOR INFO. PROCEDURE: This RFD follows the recommendations in "How to Create a New Usenet Newsgroup" and "Usenet Newsgroup Creation Companion", both of which are posted regularly to news.announce.newusers and are available at http://www.uvv.org/uvv/. The discussion period began when this RFD appeared in news.groups and will continue for at least 21 days (starting from when this proposal is first posted to news.announce.newgroups). Discussion should take place in the news.groups newsgroup. At the end of the discussion period, a Call for Votes (CFV) will be posted by a neutral vote taker. DISTRIBUTION: This RFD has been cross-posted to the following newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups,news.groups,soc.culture.japan,sci.lang.japan, fj.life.in-japan - Proponent: Mike Fester Proponent: Akira Ijuin Proponent: Shimpei Yamashita