[Buddha-l] On being moderate about being moderated

[Richard P. Hayes]

Dear denizens,

During the past couple of weeks I have been playing Sorcerer's
Apprentice again by tinkering with the various instruments here in the
control tower of buddha-l. Several problems have come to my attention
over the years, and I finally decided to try to solve some of them. 

One problem that I have noticed myself and have heard about from others
is that some messages that are sent from buddha-l do not reach all
subscribers. (The way I discover this is by receiving an interesting
reply to a message but never receiving the message to which it is a
reply.) When this happens I usually go the the archives
(http://mailman.swcp.com/mailman/listinfo/buddha-l) to find the missing
message, but that is not a very elegant solution.

Another thing that happens (not really a problem to anyone but me) is
messages being held for moderation because they are larger than the
upper size limit. (I have increased that limit, so that it should happen
less often.) Oversized messages, by the way, most frequently result from
a contributor either accidentally sending "rich format" messages that
have hidden HTML code or replying to a long message but forgetting to
trim out the parts of the long message that are not necessary for
context. You can do your part by making sure messages are not richly
formatted and being care not to include more than is really necessary
from messages to which you are responding.

In addressing the problem of missing messages, I tried to discover why
some messages that I never received had failed to get to me. One of the
ways that I checked on this was to see put up the moderation flags of
several of the most regular contributers. That enabled me to see which
messages were coming to buddha-l, which were being sent out by buddha-l,
which reached the archives, and which reached my email address. For
several days I put the entire list on what is called "emergency
moderation" (usually used only in the event of terrorist attacks and
flame wars), which means that absolutely everyone (including the
moderators) is moderated. During that time I rejected about five
messages (including one of my own) that somehow breeched the guidelines
of buddha-l (which pretty much everyone ignores pretty much always
anyway).

The problem of the undelivered messages turned out to be on my computer,
not on buddha-l. (I have an overzealous spam filter that sometimes dumps
discussion group messages into a folder indelicately named Junk. I
renamed the folder Guantánamo, and that seems to have solved the
problem.) Once I discovered that, I took buddha-l off Terror Alert Level
Orange. The only people whose moderation flags were still waving were a
few of those regular contributors whose flags I had raised individually.
I have been restoring them to no-moderation mode as their messages have
come in for moderation. I believe everything is back to how it used to
be now, except that messages can be longer than used to be the case.

If any problems come to your attention, please address them either to me
or to Jim Peavler, so we we do our best to solve them or at least
salivate on them.

Moderately yours,
Richard