More of this Feature • Part 1: Order to the Chaos • Part 3: Discussion vs Announcement • Part 4: Open vs Closed • Part 5: Individual-Message vs Digest

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Marina and her colleagues and friends (you sure remember them, don't you?) started off with an "anarchic" or unmoderated mailing list.

Everybody said what the had or wanted to say. Every message of one of the members of the list was distributed to every member on the list without any bias, prejudice or censorship. The majority of all mailing lists are unmoderated.

Soon, however, the lang-dang list gained in both publicity and members. This basically good thing turned bad when some (reactionary?) people on the list started posting destructive messages; of course not only the quality of the mails was destructive but also their quantity: the lang-dang list was flooded with hundreds of garbage messages.

Moderate(d) Freedom

As a first measure, Marina unsubscribed and banned the offenders from the list (after trying to convince them that some discussion moral is vital). In a second step to improve the overall quality of the postings and the so-called message-to-noise ratio the remaining list members decided to make lang-dang a moderated list.

Now every message sent to the list by a member first was delivered to Marina only. She, the "list mom", would then read it and approve it if she deemed it appropriate for the list or disapprove the mail if she thought it was not worth being sent to the other list members. After Marina had approved a message it was delivered to the other list members, just as if it was a posting to an unmoderated list; disapproved messages went to the trash can (sometimes Marina could not resist responding to the poster, but that's a different story).

Summary

To sum this chapter up, on an unmoderated mailing list, every message sent to the list is sent to all members indiscriminately while on a moderated mailing list only messages approved by the list moderator proceed to the list members.

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