I'm editing this file together from a couple of messages that I wrote to the list. Please forgive me if it seems somewhat choppy.
In my eyes, the main reason that we switched from an unmoderated to a moderated list was to reduce some of the traffic. In the hopes of doing that in a smart way, I've tried to lay down some ground rules which will allow the traffic that remains to carry a high signal/noise ratio. If you have any suggestions as to how to modify these rules, or if you think that the moderator is not doing a good job of enforcing them, please register your complaint with rowe@psych.ucsb.edu. Most of the rules should be fairly straightforward netiquette IMHO.
First off, I want to make it clear that I'm not going to literally approve of each message I allow onto the list. That means I may disagree with sentiments, and I might personally feel that some threads are rather silly or whatever, but I'll let them through anyway provided I don't get complaints about those threads from more than three individuals (see rule 6 below). If an individual contribution is so silly that I think it's intended as nothing other than humor, I'm going to add [joke] to the subject line. That way if you only want serious things, you can (provided your software lets you) decide to delete some messages by glancing at their subject lines. Alternatively if you only want to see the jokes you can scan for [joke] in the subject lines... Some people expressed an apparent fear that their posts would be "branded" as jokes as though this was something they should avoid. That wasn't (and isn't) my intent here. As of this writing I have only labelled one message as a joke, and I asked the author if I could before I did it. You can help me by writing [joke] into the subject line yourself so that I never have to worry about whether or not a post should be so labelled. In any case, I intend to ask for permission any time I think there is room for doubt about the intent of the author of a particular message. (You might also want to see rule 8 here.)
Before laying out the rules of engagement, let me define the term "reject". When I say I will "reject" a message, I mean that I will return it to the sender with an explanation as to why I don't think I should post it. If you send a message to the list and neither see it nor a message from me about it, please let me know. You should always get one or the other (unless you told listproc not to acknowledge your messages).
1) If a message contains nothing other than how a previous message makes one feel, it will get rejected. (IMHO prior to moderation this was a real problem.)
2) If I feel a point has already been covered by a previous message (irrespective of who wrote the previous message), the subsequent message will be rejected. This has been difficult for me to enforce -- there's almost always leeway about whether or not something has been said before because people word things differently; it also can be good to have something said in more than one way -- so I'm tending to be lax about my enforcement of this rule. If traffic on the list starts to soar again, though, I might get stricter about such things. Let me try to make it clear, though, that you really shouldn't take it personally if I reject a message because it doesn't appear to contain anything new. It certainly doesn't mean your message isn't better (or at least as good as) previous ones...
3) If a message contains too much text from previous messages with only slight additions by the person submitting the current message, it will be rejected. The sender can choose to edit their message (e.g. summarize rather than quote, or just don't quote so much) and re-submit. The general rule of thumb I'm trying to use here is the same as that used by newsreaders such as tin: if more than half of the lines in a message are quotes from previous material, the message is likely to get rejected (but see Addendum below). Unlike tin, though, this policy isn't automatic. I have (and will) let some messages through even though more than half of the message was old. For shorter messages I'm trying to be lenient, but it's hard for me to be lenient on this particular rule since the criterion can be made mercilessly objective.
4) If an individual has already sent 5 messages that day, subsequent messages will be rejected. If you expect that to be a problem for you, I suggest that you attempt to restrain yourself and learn to accept that this list and the time spent by its subscribers are precious resources. Remember that with a single message you can respond to multiple previous messages. As of this writing (nearly two weeks after I've started moderating) no one has had a message rejected because of this criterion. I don't think that anyone has actually hit the five message limit, but I confess that I haven't actually been tallying messages. I established this rule because on some days some participants were (prior to moderation) sending 20-30 messages per day. I intended to reinforce to those individuals that our time is a precious commodity that shouldn't be squandered. For now I recommend that you don't complain about this policy until and unless you expect to violate it. I will probably allow people to violate it as long as they don't become flagrant. However, so far it hasn't been an issue, so I don't yet have any experiences telling me how to deal with it.
5) If an individual attempts to respond more than once to the same message, that second message will be rejected. Please try to spend time thinking about issues before you respond not after.
7) If I feel a particular message is of interest only to one or a few other individuals, I will forward that message to those individuals instead of to the list. I'll also forward it back to the person who wrote it so that they know I've done this. As of this writing I have taken this action a few times. Most people have not responded to me to let me know if they were glad or mad that I did it. I think I'm doing ok here...
I hope to be reasonable enough that we never have any problems, but I want to be prepared in case problems ever develop. With that in mind, I've established some formal guidelines about how complaints about moderation are to be handled.
If you have a grievance over a rejected message, I'll hear you out and save both sides of our conversation. If I still think your message should be rejected after your third attempt to convince me that I should allow it onto the list, I will offer to make our conversation public. If you choose that route, I will poll the list members to see which of us they agree with. If things go that far three times (i.e. if I reject three of your messages and we have to get a ruling from the list three times) and the list decides that I was justified in all three of those cases then I will no longer listen to your grievances. I honestly don't expect things ever to get this bad, but I'm trying to be thorough, fair, and prepared for the worst.
Currently the list owner (Mickey Rowe -- rowe@psych.ucsb.edu) is the only moderator. When he is away, he will make provisions for someone else to see to it that mail doesn't back up too long. It should always be clear who is moderating the list when a message is rejected because the notification will come from the then current moderator. Always feel free to bitch to Mickey, though, since it's him who will be entrusting the list to others... If traffic gets high and people want to be able to get mail out around the clock, "substitute" moderators might become a regular occurrence. Hopefully that won't make enforcement of the moderation policies irregular. But like I said, bitch at Mickey if you think it does.
Mickey Rowe
2-23-1996
[Addendum to rule 3 added 3-22-96]
[Rule 8 added 4-13-96]
[Mailto: links updated 4-25-01]