Newsgroup moderation

This section deals with questions and procedures for properly maintaining a moderated newsgroup. Moderated newsgroups are valuable sources of information and are not prone to the same chaotic failings of some usenet groups. This section will deal with the following topics:

About moderated newsgroups
Approving posts
Deleting a post from a moderated newsgroup

About moderated newsgroups

A moderated newsgroup is one where every posting must be approved before it will be posted. The person who does the approving is called the "moderator". When a user posts an article to the group the article is automatically mailed to the moderator. To reject a message, the moderator does nothing; to accept it, they must repost it with an "Approved" header.

Approving posts

If you are the moderator of a group, postings to the group will appear in your mailbox. The mail message will look like any other message, except that it will have a "Newsgroups:" header line. You must decide whether or not you will approve it.

If you don't want to post it: delete the message. You may want to reply to the sender explaining why you rejected it.
If you do want to post it: you must tell the news system that you approve. The method will vary depending on the mail reader you use. For Pine, you would type |newsapprove. (The first character is a vertical bar, called a pipe.)

Deleting a post from a moderated newsgroup

Deletion of posts is done through your newsreader. You should start up your newsreader and view your post. The next step depends on your newsreader.

tin: Type a capital "D" (for Delete).
trn: Type a capital "C" (for Cancel).

Note: At this time it is impossible to delete a post which you do not own, even if you are the moderator of the newsgroup. CKP is working on a way to do this correctly.

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