From: stewarts@ix.netcom.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 95 20:39:13 PDT
To: Michael James Gebis <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: A more sophisticated form of moderation.
Message-ID: <199507120337.UAA03191@ix4.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 01:45 PM 7/11/95 -0500, Michael James Gebis wrote:
>Specifically, I was thinking along the lines of a newsgroup where only
>selected individuals are able to post, but anybody who wants to can read
>the group.  However, the "selected individuals" could fall into several
>categories.

Not hard to implement things like this.  With the current non-cryptoized
moderation system, anybody can post to a moderated group by putting an
"Approved:" header line on their article.  And articles can be cancelled by
anyone who wants to forge an cancel, so articles with forged approvals can
be cancelmoosed away if people want.  You could set up a cancelbot that trashes
any article that doesn't have the magic words from the FAQ
        Approved: Squeamish Ossifrage
in the header, or doesn't have the right digital signature in the approvals,
where you've only given teh keys to the Moderation Cabal.

Or, for a system where mail has to go to a moderator first, similar to the
current mail-to-moderator posting method, you could set up a mail-pool for
the moderator's address, that sends each article out to 1..N of the moderators
(e.g. to whoever's on duty today, or everybody, or a random k of the
moderators for
load-sharing), who could then post them.

If you want a mailing-list approach, they're easier - just send your mailing
list
through procmail on the mailhost, and set it up to accept/reject/etc. whoever
your list policy wants.

If somebody comes out with D News, the crypto-cancel-based system,
it can use a digital signature system like RIPEM-SIG (which is exportable)
or some equivalent we can build out of PGP after the PGP 3.0 toolkit
becomes available.

#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com