I'm posting my followup to news.groups given my long-standing objection
to proposal discussion taking place in a moderated newsgroup, not to
mention failure to appreciate the irony of everything that's wrong with
relying on one hypothetical person, who may not exist in real life, as
the single point of failure in moderation, and trying to discuss this in
a MODERATED newsgroup.

Months ago, the long-time owner of a mailing list I subscribe to got
sick and didn't want to be the list owner any longer. Several of us
volunteered, and he appointed a team. That's an actual solution. Now,
the mailing list isn't moderated but there are administrative tasks to
attend to.

But on Usenet, each and every time somebody has proposed a moderated
newsgroup (generally to solve a problem that should have been addressed
with kill filing and not troll feeding), the Big 8 hierarchy administrators
have newgrouped it. Nearly always, they failed to insist upon a
moderation team and a moderator succession policy.

We all just have to accept that moderated newsgroups are temporary. Once
the original moderator has lost interest or lost his connectivity or no
longer has time or dropped dead and just didn't care enough to appoint a
replacement, his inaction killed the group. The group is dead. There's
nothing to save. Its former users need to change their posting habits in
favor of unmoderated Usenet or mailing lists or some other medium of
communication,

Under tale, well, he used to do something worse: Moderation in place.
People, not volunteering to become moderators themselves, continue to
suggest this bad idea.

Changing the moderation flag with a control message CANNOT be done
simultaneously everywhere all at once, and on some sites it will never
happen, due to the decentralized nature of News administration. Stop
suggesting this. It's a terrible idea. There is no problem to solve in
doing that. Just post to unmoderated Usenet.

noel <deletethis@invalid.lan> wrote:
>On Sat, 02 Dec 2023 06:35:13 -0600, Steve Bonine wrote:
>>So for two years there has been the issue of "people inadvertently
>>posting to the group (and possibly becoming confused about why their
>>posts never pass moderation)" and now there's a reason to remove the
>>group? The only result will be the removal of the historical posts in
>>the newsgroup; I've never seen a newsgroup admin who reacted to a
>>rmgroup by marking the group read-only. I don't know if "read only" is
>>even a possibility; I've never seen a newsreader that supported it.

>>Not that I think there are people clamoring to peruse 20-year-old Usenet
>>material, but there are many dead moderated newsgroups and I think the
>>consensus was that removing them is a waste of time when the discussion
>>was held years ago.

>Late to the party I know, but, how about just removing the moderation and
>allow the group to remain, just, "open"

Wow. Someone claiming to be a decades-long Usenet user is supposed to
know the answer to that: Because sending a control message to change the
moderation flag doesn't simultaneously act upon every News server and
there will always be some News servers that will never act upon it.

There is no shortage of unmoderated newsgroups with *.radio.* in the
name. Undoubtably one will be on topic for whatever someone cares to
discuss.

Let people post to any of the unmoderated newsgroups. This newsgroup
cannot be revived till a replacement moderator steps forward, even if
the newsgroup ends up being minimally moderated.