From: rbs{at}snippets.org
To: c_echo{at}yahoogroups.com

On Wed, 13 Aug 2003 Roy J. Tellason wrote:

> I used to occasionally get "free speech" thrown at me while
moderating,
> and this doesn't apply.  The (US) constitutional guarantee of free speech
> says _only_ one thing:  That *GOVERNMENT* isn't allowed to restrict what
> people can say.  The actions of a moderator in trying to keep an echo
> focused on the topic of that echo isn't government,  by a long shot,  it's
> maintaining the quality of that echo to the benefit of the rest of the
> participants,  those who are here to discuss and learn about c programming.

For folks whose memory goes waaaay back, in the mid 80's there were a
couple of lawyers who were looking to use FidoNet to make a name for
themselves. They'd show up, misbehave, then try to hijack the Echo,
threatening legal action against the moderators. Their legal basis for
this was to try to get a federal court to classify FidoNet as a public
carrier. It might have worked. For all I know, based on recent traffic,
someone may have done it by now.

These guys had the backbone providers running scared and everyone nervous.
They tried it in the C_Echo and that's actually where I made my first big
splash even though I wasn't the moderator at the time. Having worked part
of my way through college as a paralegal and investigator for a law firm,
I tracked these guys down and learned who they worked for and what
positions they held in the firm. I then posted a message to the C_Echo
divulging all this information and suggesting all who were unhappy with
what they were trying to pull should: 1) write to the senior members of
the law firm complaining about the behavior of their employees (yes, I
included the names of the managing partners along with the firm's
address); and 2) call them and their bosses at least twice/day until the
issue was resolved.

The resulting influx of mail and phone traffic must have been successful,
because these guys instantly disappeared from every Echo they were trying
to disrupt.

> Anybody posting in here on any other topic dilutes that for the rest of
> us (me putting this post in here included).

One of the rules from the "old days" was that not every message had to be
strictly on-topic. This is an inherently impersonal medium in which we
attempt to build a community. Building a community requires personal
connections. The foundation has to be the amount of information someone
contributes to the topic, but the off-topic messages put a human face on
everything. When you think about it, how much credence you lend to
someone's post depends to a large degree on how much you respect them as a
source of information. The off-topic traffic helped establish the
credibility and perceptions of each contributor.

In the case of this thread, the Echo itself and its future should
definitely be on-topic. As for the rest, that was part of the moderator's
job - to control the S/N ratio. Few moderators ever tried to enforce zero
tolerance, since it made the whole experience very sterile.  Even the
occasional quarrel, if controlled, had the opportunity to contribute
worthwhile information. Only when the off-topic traffic became a real
distraction did the moderator send private mail to end it. And only after
repeated attempts to end it had failed was the excommunication penalty
invoked.

In the final analysis, I also factored in individual statistics. I
exercised a great deal of tolerance for any who contributed lots of useful
information and/or code. Folks like you, Auke, Thad Smith, Ray Gardner and
others could post an occasional message about something as irrelevant and
insignificant as the weather and I'd let it pass without comment. OTOH,
folks who only took from the echo and never gave anything back, and then
spent time griping and arguing received zero tolerance. Most of the
membership actually fell in between these extremes.

As far as the excommunication penalty goes, in 90+% of such cases, the
action was instigated by an echo member complaining to the moderator. I
don't know of any moderators who undertook excommunication as a personal
crusade against any specific members. For my part, when other were
feuding, I merely kept an eye on things until an echo rule was violated or
until others asked me to intervene. In the few cases where I was one of
the parties to the disagreement, I never took action without membership
support. I had the authority to do so, but I viewed it, as I'm sure others
would have, as an abuse of that authority.

Occasionally, the offender was a buddy of the BBS operator who thought of
him/herself as untouchable. That's when the moderator's job got
interesting - moving back up the FidoNet hierarchy to find the person
(most often the ZC) with the clout to get the entire BBS de-list'ed. ]:>
One threat from that level always got the offender excommunicated.

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