Bowerbird wrote:
a rather alarming thing has come to my attention.
it seems that michael hart is being censored by jon noring over on jon's listserve. messages from michael appear to have to be "approved" before they are posted to the list. the evidence is sitting right there in the "headers" to see.
jon, is this actually the case? i demand you confirm or deny.
if so, i find it quite preposterous.
What an odd message to gutvol-d! The timing is very strange, too. Answer below...
if any person has earned the right to speak freely about electronic-books, michael has. (and let us remember that no one needs to "earn" this right in the first place; the right to speak freely is an inalienable human right -- one recognized in the charter of the united nations.)
unless michael is allowed to post freely on jon's listserve, without having to go through the "mother may i" routine of having posts "approved" by jon or any other moderator, i -- for one -- will cease to converse with noring in any way.
you've got until noon on monday to fix this egregious error, jon.
<laugh class="rotf"/> First point: The eBook Community is slowly being moved over to full moderation, mainly because it has to -- to fight spam and email spoofing. Every day I'm deleting a score or more of spam. The reason why TeBC is mostly clean (vis-a-vis spam) is because of my efforts to keep it clean. With over 2800 subscribers and growing, with links to it all over the Internet, TeBC is a big target for spammers, spoofers, and virus/trojan distributors. TeBC home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-community/ All new subscribers are automatically being put into moderation. Only some of the very old-timers are still on "grandfather clause", but that will change, too, eventually. (It's only fair for everyone that all are treated equally.) Other plans call for forming an advisory committee to oversee the operation of TeBC, including group moderation and maintaining/revising message requirements. Note that posts from *anyone* are disallowed only if they blatantly disparage others rather than focusing on rational and polite discourse of the topic at hand (reminds me of someone else I know -- yes, I know, a disparaging remark), or are wholly off-topic (announcements of particular ebook titles are usually off-topic, for example.) Second point: There is a history why Michael is on moderation, but am not at liberty to discuss it. If Michael brings up his side of the story, then I'll feel more free to discuss it from my perspective (which I may or may not.) But at this time it is between Michael and I. It is nothing really serious, actually -- at the time moderation was started, I had decided to slowly move TeBC over to full moderation in a few year time period. When it comes to moderation, I don't treat Michael any differently than I treat any of the others who are on moderation. His many messages and his perspectives of things are much welcome. Although I disagree with a lot of his views and philosophical approach to digitizing the Public Domain and am pretty vocal about it (I also agree with him on many things), I do respect him and his accomplishments. He is a welcome and honored participant in the eBook Community. Let's look at some statistics. Of the last 1354 messages to TeBC (all the posts since 01 Feb 2005), guess who posted more to TeBC than anyone else? You guessed right: Michael Hart with 160 messages, about 12% of the total. The next most prolific posters were 102, 63 (yours truly), 56 and 51, and then a few dozen more people posting fewer messages in that time frame. (I'm sure Michael will appreciate the statistics showing him to be #1 on TeBC.) Of course, the best person to answer this is Michael. He may not like being moderated -- who does? A few of the many messages he has posted over time were disallowed, but the total percentage is very low -- I won't go into the specifics but will say moderation was done mostly to prevent certain always-emotional topics, like copyright, from spiraling out of control, so I temporarily closed discussion on those topics. Interestingly, the copyright discussion is now heavy again on TeBC, and I'm keeping a close watch on it to halt it if it spirals out of control (which may filter out some of Michael's messages since copyright is a big concern of his.) Third point (a couple questions actually): Btw, should John Mark Ockerbloom also not moderate Michael on John's "Book People" list"? He moderates everyone, including Michael. Should Michael be given a pass because he is *the* Michael Hart? Note that I am moderated along with everyone else on BP, and I have no difficulty with that. I admire John's dedication in keeping discussion on Book People focused and civilized. Bowerbird, do you believe that all public forums should have no moderation nor kick anyone off for repeated and uncontrolled egregious behavior towards others (i.e., ad hominem attacks and focusing on the person's motives rather than on what they said), thereby disrupting the forum discussion? ********************************************************************* Anyway, to summarize and focus on the topic of this gutvol-d thread, I take fair moderation of TeBC seriously. And Michael is moderated no differently than everyone else. If anything, I cut him a little more slack than the others. Jon Noring