This document can be found at http://www.gweep.ca/~robomod/rec.arts.drwho.moderated/ Frequently asked questions for rec.arts.drwho.moderated: Questions included in this FAQ: 1. What is this newsgroup about? 2. How do I post to it? 3. Why are there no frequently asked questions about Dr Who here? 4. What kinds of postings will be rejected by the moderators? 5. Somebody posted something bad! How did that get through? What can I do about it? 6. I sent a message that I thought was OK, but the moderators rejected it! What can I do? 7. What other Dr Who newsgroups and mailing lists are there? 8. My postings are going straight up onto the newsgroup, but nobody else can see them. What's going on? 9. I posted something, but it never arrived! What's wrong? 10. I want to talk about the way this newsgroup is being managed! 11. I got a rejection notice about long lines. What does this mean? 12. I'd like to post with a fake email address. Is this allowed? How do I do it? 13. How does the overquoting rule work with the robomod? 14. Temporary rules currently in effect 15. About this FAQ *Frequently Asked Questions for rec.arts.drwho.moderated:* 1. What is this newsgroup about? This newsgroup is for the discussion of Dr Who, including but not limited to the television series, the books, the audio adventures, the movie, conventions, and fandom in general. There's a great big Whoniverse out there - the fandom has remained surprisingly strong, thanks to the continuing lines of books and audio productions. The newsgroup is moderated, so you will (hopefully) find most of the postings to be on-topic and polite. 2. How do I post to it? rec.arts.drwho.moderated is a moderated newsgroup, so postings that you initially send to it will not immediately appear. If they do, you may have a misconfigured news-server - more on that later. What *should* happen is that you get a message notifying you that your posting is in the queue waiting for a moderator to approve it. If your first posting is then approved, your postings will go straight through to the newsgroup from then on. If any future posting breaks the guidelines, you will either be sent a warning message from the moderators, or a warning message from the robomod (software which automatically rejects messages which are spam, crossposted, overquoted, not in plain text, etc). If you continue to break the guidelines, you may be placed on a "hand-moderation" list for a time. 3. Why are there no frequently asked questions about Dr Who here? This FAQ is really about the newsgroup, not about Dr Who itself. The FAQs you're after can be found here: http://nitro9.earth.uni.edu/doctor/FAQ/ 4. What kinds of postings will be rejected by the moderators? To quote from the rec.arts.drwho.moderated style guide at http://www.gweep.ca/~robomod/rec.arts.drwho.moderated/ - The main kinds of posts which will be rejected by first time posters are: 1) Flames (postings which, in the judgment of the moderators, are meant to personally insult or attack a member of the newsgroup, or to make unsupported allegations about them) 2) Trolls (postings which, in the judgment of the moderators, are intended to provoke angry responses from other members of the newsgroup) 3) Spam (including all off-topic advertising material, and on-topic advertising material posted more than once a fortnight) 4) Off-topic posts (postings which, in the judgment of the moderators, are off-topic and/or will probably lead to flames or trolls) 5) Overquoted posts (postings which have a ratio of quoted text to original content of more than 70%) 6) Cross-posts (postings which are posted to more than one newsgroup simultaneously) 7) Posts not in plain text (binaries, HTML, RTF, etc, excluding small binaries such as PGP signatures) [Note: a newsgroup member is defined to be a person who has used an email address which appears on the newsgroup posters list made available to the moderators. Email addresses on this list expire after 6 months if they are not used to post in this time.] Threads which, in the judgment of the moderators, are off-topic and/or will probably lead to flames or trolls will be placed in a queue to be approved or rejected by the moderators according to 1-5 above (this is called hand moderation). In the event that the moderators are unsure of the intent of a post that has either been complained about or might, in the opinion of the moderators, be considered a troll or flame, evidence of prior behaviour in other discussion fora can be used to help the moderators in deciding the intent of the poster. Any evidence that is used by the moderators in said way must be posted publicly to modish within 24 hours of a decision. Overquoted posts, cross-posts and posts not in plain text may also be automatically rejected by the server software (called the robomod). If a post is rejected, the robomod will send a copy of the post to the poster with a brief explanation from the rejecting moderator. Posters may rewrite their posts and resubmit them if they wish. Moderators are subject to the same rules as other posters. If it becomes necessary, the other moderators will hand moderate their posts. Moderators will not make any changes to the content of posts. Another interesting article is at: http://www.gweep.ca/~edmonds/misc/self-discipline.txt 5. Somebody posted something bad! How did that get through? What can I do about it? Most posters to rec.arts.drwho.moderated are auto-approved - their posts aren't hand-moderated. They can post anything they want. If you feel that their post does not conform to the style guide then you can email radwm-moderator@gweep.ca. Include details of the subject, the poster, and why you think the post should not have been approved. If the panel agrees, they will send a warning email to the poster, or put them on the hand-moderated list right away, if they have had previous warnings. 6. I sent a message that I thought was OK, but the moderators rejected it! What can I do? To quote the style guide again: If a poster feels that their message should not have been rejected, they can appeal in email to the entire moderation panel at radwm-moderator@gweep.ca. If even one of the moderators decides their message should have been accepted, it may be re-submitted and will be approved. If a poster is unhappy with the panel's decision, they may discuss the issue in a publicly accessible Yahoo! mailing list named modish. The purpose of this mailing list is to discuss moderation and meta issues, alert the moderators to posts which may not be following the rules, or lodge No Confidence Motions in any or all moderators. The mailing list is moderated by admins appointed by the moderation panel (who may also dismiss them at their discretion), and all moderators are required to be members of the list. To subscribe to modish via the web: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/modish/ To subscribe to modish via email: modish-subscribe@yahoogroups.com The admins of modish have their own similar set of rules governing the list, agreed on by the moderation panel, which are posted to the list at regular intervals and can be found at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/modish/files 7. What other Dr Who newsgroups/mailing lists/forums are there? Lots and lots. Newsgroups: rec.arts.drwho is an unmoderated newsgroup for discussion of Dr Who. rec.arts.drwho.info is a moderated group for information on conventions, reviews, and so on. alt.drwho.creative is an unmoderated group for fan fiction. alt.binaries.drwho is an unmoderated group for posting of binaries. uk.media.tv.sf.drwho is an unmoderated group for the UK. Mailing Lists: Doctor Who Discussion List http://serendipity.drwho.org/drwho-l/ The House at Allen Road (moderated). http://www.reuben.net/allenroad.html Doctor Who in the 21st Century http://whonews.tripod.com/ Forums: Outpost Gallifrey has an extensive and popular forum. http://www.gallifreyone.com/ This Week in Doctor Who has information on Doctor Who TV broadcasts around the world. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thisweekindoctorwho/ Totters Lane is a general forum. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/totterslane/join ANDROZANI is a general forum. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ANDROZANI/join Jade Pagoda is a forum for the continuing series of books. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Jade_Pagoda/ A Good Doctor Who List is a general forum. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agooddrwholist/ Planet Skaro is a general forum. http://pub98.ezboard.com/bplanetskaro 8. My postings are going straight up onto the newsgroup, but nobody else can see them. What's going on? What has probably happened is that your news server is improperly configured. This has happened to rec.arts.drwho.moderated on quite a few servers, for reasons unknown. All moderated newsgroups should be tagged by their news server as being "moderated". This means that whenever someone posts a message to that newsgroup, it gets sent to an email address for the moderators to deal with. The moderators then post the message. If your news server doesn't have the "moderated" tag on rec.arts.drwho.moderated, all posts will go straight up on your news server's copy of rec.arts.drwho.moderated. However, because the article hasn't been properly moderated, no other news servers will "pick it up" - in other words, everybody who is reading news from properly configured servers *won't see your message*! To determine if this is the case, there are a couple of different checks you can make. One is to look at the headers of your post. Your newsreader should give you the option of displaying all your headers - when you have done so, you should see lines at the top of your post like "Received:" followed by lots of server information. Look for a line that begins with "Approved:". If there isn't one, then your news server is misconfigured. Another check is to look at your news reader. Some of them indicate that the newsgroup is moderated with a letter "M" (eg. tin) or the word "moderated" (eg. trn). Have a look at the newsgroup rec.arts.drwho.info by comparison - it is also a moderated newsgroup, and should be tagged as such. Lastly, if you're still not sure, send an email to radwm-moderator@gweep.ca, explaining what you have done. We should be able to help you out. If your news server is improperly configured, you should send a message to the provider of your news server - generally, your ISP - stating "I think that the [your news server] has the rec.arts.drwho.moderated newsgroup incorrectly tagged as being unmoderated. I have send a post with the Subject [subject of a post that you sent to the newsgroup, on your news server] to rec.arts.drwho.moderated and it has appeared on your news server. Could you fix the newsgroup so that it is tagged as moderated, please?" 9. I posted something, but it never arrived! What's wrong? First, check your return email address (Return-Path). Is it a valid email address? If not, perhaps your post is getting rejected, but the moderators can't notify you as such. Next, try emailing your post to: rec-arts-drwho-moderated@moderators.isc.org This is exactly what happens to posts normally (your news server will eventually forward your post to rec-arts-drwho-moderated@gweep.ca anyway) but you are skipping a step or two. If your post gets through this way, then rec.arts.drwho.moderated is misconfigured on your news server. See the previous question for details. If you've gotten acknowledgement posts stating that your post has been accepted, try waiting a few hours. Sometimes it takes a while for posts to arrive on your local news server. Sometimes the news servers themselves fail. Don't worry - it is very unlikely that your post will go permanently missing. Usually they will queue up and get all posted at once. If you're still having problems, email the moderators at radwm-moderator@gweep.ca. Please include either the post you made, or the Subject header and the email address that you used to make the post. 10. I want to talk about the way this newsgroup is being managed! There's a great forum for discussions *about* rec.arts.drwho.moderated - it's: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/modish/ You'll find all kinds of juicy, unmoderated discussion about just what ought to be allowed and what oughtn't, and so on. Don't talk about these kind of things on rec.arts.drwho.moderated itself. That's for talking about Dr Who. 11. I got a rejection notice about long lines. What does this mean? The configuration of the server that the newsgroup resides on requires that lines be 79 characters or less (preferably 72), and it may reject posts with longer line lengths than 79. Placing the keywords "long lines" somewhere in the post (e.g. "sorry about the long lines, but...") should prevent automatic rejection of the post, unless the line exceeds 160 characters, in which case it will be rejected regardless. Posters who experience repeated difficulties in this regard are encouraged to work with the mods and server host to solve the problem, or to make use of URL-shortening sites to overcome the restriction for particularly lengthy URLs. 12. I'd like to post with a fake email address. Is this allowed? How do I do it? The server host would strongly prefer that completely fake email addresses not be used. They certainly will not be auto-approved. You may register a real address and a "munged" address with it (a "munged" address is an address with some sort of spamblock put in, such as greg@earthlinkSPAMBLOCK.net) if you like, and then only the munged address will show up on the newsgroup. You can do this with the following documentation: http://www.gweep.ca/~robomod/register.html ...or you can use a completely fake address and continue to have your posts to the group manually approved (or rejected) by the moderators. The advantage of registering a real and munged address together is that rejection notices will get sent to the real address, but everyone else will see the munged one. 13. How does the overquoting rule work with the robomod? From the server host: In short, it strips the sig (anything after a line of "-- "), if any, counts any line starting with a quote character, typically >, as a quoted line, counts any other non-blank line as a new line, and if there are more than 16 new+quoted lines the percentage of quoted lines (quoted/(new+quoted)) must be less than 70%. The system then keeps a count for each address. This number has a minimum of zero and maximum of six. Each overquoted post bumps it up by one, each ok post drops it down by one. If it's over two and an overquoted post is received, the post is rejected. If it's not over two and an overquoted post is received a warning is issued. 14. Temporary rules currently in effect TEMPORARY RULE CHANGES: Pursuant to the requirement in the styleguide that all temporary rule changes must be publicised every two weeks, here is a list of the temporary rule changes. A vote will be taken among RADWM participants to make the changes permanent after the new moderation board is seated. -- There are no temporary rule changes currently in effect. Any discussion of the temporary rule changes should take place in Modish, the public mailing list set up for RADWM meta-discussion, not in the group itself. See above for instructions on how to sign up for Modish. 15. About this FAQ This FAQ is currently maintained by the RADWM Moderation Panel. Please send suggestions or queries to radwm-moderator@gweep.ca with the words "radwm FAQ" in the subject line. Thanks to: Siobahn Morgan Kate Orman Andrew Shellshear Jim Vowles Brian Edmonds