Moderators wanted

[Guest guest]

I'm sending out this renewed call for moderators because I don't want to

make any assumptions about who is and who isn't interested now that I'm the

new list owner.

I'd like more than one. Moderators ought to be reasonably active on the

list, and there will inevitably be occasions when a moderator will be

involved in a thread which needs a touch of moderation. Since there are

bound to be times when I'll be too busy to be on the list every day, a

second moderator will dramatically reduce any potential appearances (or

actual instances) of conflicts of interest. (IOW if someone calls

Moderator A a jerk, it would be much better to have someone other than

Moderator A tell the offending poster to clean up his or her language, and

while that other person will generally be me, there will be times when I'm

unavailable.)

Ideally, volunteers should have a good deal of moderation experience, but

it's not absolutely necessary. I won't, however, consider anyone who's too

new to the list. The list has a certain character and focus, and you need

to have been here awhile to have a good feel for how things should be.

The most important task I'll expect moderators to handle will be spam --

deleting spam messages and banning spammers. So far this has been an

infrequent problem, but it's not impossible that it'll blow up and get

really aggravating, in which case having multiple people on the job will

help a lot. There are various ways to partially close the list (requiring

authorization for new members, for example) but as far as I'm concerned

those are a last resort, because they'll have a chilling effect on new

memberships and therefore on new viewpoints and information.

Secondarily, every once in a while rhetoric on the list gets a touch

heated. I'll deal with that myself as much as possible, but it's not out

of the realm of possibility that the task might occasionally devolve on

someone else when I'm not around. Diplomacy and a very light touch in

those (very rare) instances are required. I'm not interested in alienating

people who are totally cool 99% of the time. Genuine trolls are a

different story, but they haven't been a problem (yet).

If you're interested, please email me privately. I don't want to clutter

up the list with administrative business.

Thanks!

-