> Please, advice a junior on whether going private & moderated. Froom your description, it sounds like you need it, and immediately. > Would a votation from the subscribers be good ? It might be good take a poll, where the answers are sent privately to you, in order for you to get *advice* on your next steps. But given your current situation, DO NOT put this up for discussion before taking action, otherwise (it appears) you will lose all you had hoped to preserve. Go into moderation immediately, at least temporarily, I'll urge you, and then tell your subscribers that you're seriously considering making it permanent, and you'd like advice on that next step sent *privately* to your personal address. If you put it to a vote first with no other immediate action, there are many who will (1) argue that there shouldn't be a vote because there should never be any moderation, (2) try stall you for time by saying that the question you've asked is incorrect and should be re-worded, (3) etc. From what you've written, this kind of debate will apparently tick off the many "seniors" who you're trying to preserve on the list. > What are the less good aspects of moderating in your opinion ? It may take up A LOT of your personal time. And if timeliness may be important on your list, then remember that whenever you're not attending to the moderation, there will be a delay in the discussion. Also, to be a good moderator you will need to constantly review whether you are making judgments from your personal point of view or instead from the point of view of the needs of the discussion group. > What are the implications of moderation on "Freedom of Speech" ? Few. Freedom must always be balanced with responsibility. An extreme in either direction will be destructive. Given your original vision for your list, the list's behavior has become extreme w.r.t. freedom. If other people wish to create a new, unmoderated list on your topic, they are free to do so. Consider this: if your professional peers decided to hold an in-person conference in the usual fashion with a set agenda, proceedings to be published, etc. -- would the chairman of the meeting allow members of the public to step up and say anything they liked at any time? Even to the point of disrupting the meeting? If that were allowed, then the professional society might never be able to accomplish any business. At a professional meeting, the public (1) might be barred from attending, (2) might be allowed to attend but not to speak, or (3) might be allowed to speak IF there is sufficient extra time, but even then only at the discretion of the chairman, whi has a duty to see that the professionals' time is not wasted. Similar policies may be appropriate for your list. It is appropriate for a professional society to have its meetings chaired and discussion rules enforced. Similarly, you have a right -- and actually, a duty -- to moderate your list when necessary. No need to be inconfident about it. > Is dicatorship the only solution ? Dictatorship may be too harsh a word (depending on your moderating style). Please do not think of moderation as necessarily being a dictatorship, even though some will insist to you that it is. You do have other options. One is that you can greatly limit the members of the list to only those who have a *professional* interest in the topic in question. Although there may be difficulty in converting an already established and openly subscribed list to the narrower kind I'm describing here, in concept you could have a list limited to professionals. To implement this (and the following example is for a newly created list), you can set Subscription= By_owner and then send a standard message to each would-be subscriber saying that this is a professionals-only list, and request that they provide information about their professional standing, and ADD them after they've provided that info. Another alternative to consider is something I've considered for a professional list I've created. You can create TWO levels of list membership -- read-only AND those who can discuss. To do this, you'll need to create a 2nd list which will interrelate with the first. This may sound complicated, but bear with me for a few moments. Have a GENERAL list for the public which anyone can subscribe to, but which the public cannot post to because you don't set Send= Public. In your Welcome message you say that DISCUSSION privileges will be granted only to professionals, and if you want those privileges, fill out the following form which asks for your professional affiliation and send it to the list-owner. State a rule that if you lie about having a professional affiliation, you may be deleted by the list-owner. Now, you also have a 2ND list which is for those who are privileged to discuss. That is Subscription= By_owner and you ADD those who appear to be qualified professionals. To make this system work, you set the GENERAL list to Send= Editor and you set Editor= Owner Editor= (2ND-LIST) With this set-up, everyone sends messages to the GENERAL address. The 2ND-LIST people get automatically posted, because they're "editors". The non-priviliged GENERAL subscribers will have their posting sent to the list-owner, who can write back to say they're not privileged as yet, so why don't you apply. In fact, the public need never know about this 2ND-LIST, which might be better since it may only confuse them. They just need to know that you've got some means of distinguishing between privileged and non-privileged subscribers. For the 2ND-LIST you can set Confidential= Yes and have a Welcome message for that list saying "you are now priviliged -- send all postings to the GENERAL list address". One thing I'll mention about administration of this system -- I won't be regularly checking the credentials of those who apply for privileged status (that could be VERY time consuming). Instead, I'll post rules saying (1) if you're not credentialled as you said on your application, you may be immediately deleted, and (2) those privileged members who suspect that one of our number is not actually qualified per the rule may tell the list-owner about this concern privately, who will then check it out and proceed accordingly. So between the simple subscribe-by-owner system and the slightly elaborate system just described, you have more options available to you in the long run that just hands-on moderating. But in your given situation, I recommend that you go to temporary moderation immediately while you consider your next steps. -- Roger Burns [log in to unmask]