Anthea said: > Dan's desciption of how his moderating works is interesting. It is hard > for me to imagine, though, that anyone would volunteer to moderate a list > like ours (even for one day a week) which receives in excess of 50 messages > a day (and almost all of them are 40 lines or more). Let me say a bit more about this. We were running about 65 messages per day before we switched to full moderation. It has dropped considerable. But I'm sure that in other ways, our list is very different. Our list is for kids between 10 and 15. The moderators are also kids in this age range--except for the one that just turned 16. Our rules are straight-forward; there is not much ambiguity. The kids forward messages they are not sure about to me, but I don't get very many. When a message is OK, it is really no more work to moderate it than it is to read it. We are using a Unix account with elm for the moderation. I've defined a one-letter alias for the address of the list. It only takes five keystrokes to read, approve, and delete a message (plus hitting the space bar enough times to read through the message). It *does* take longer to reject a message. We have a set of form letters that cover all the reasons we reject messages. We reply, quoting the message we got, and insert the appropriate form letter. One of my project this summer will be to work on the macros we use to send the form letters. I'm sure I can make it much easier. We don't get arguments about why things were rejected, but we do get some questions which I answer. I think that having a team makes the rejections less personal--and thus less likely to generate arguments. > Here is another problem: I know it sounds ridiculous, but I get really, really > upset by nastygrams. In fact, I get so upset that it causes me not to take > steps that are necessary in order to run the list well. Does anyone have a > good way of dealing with nastygrams? I'm fortunate to have a fairly thick skin--and to be working with lists that have very little nastiness. I think the team approach is good here as well. We actually have about 16 lists and a large group of adult volunteers working with them. When I get tired of dealing with someone, I can dump them on someone else. ;-) We even have a private list for the volunteers to coordinate their work. It sounds to me like you need help with the list--whatever course you take. And having someone else take care of the people who insist on being nasty is a perfectly reasonable way to divide responsibilties. Some people would even enjoy this. :-( Peace, Dan << Daniel D. Wheeler Internet: [log in to unmask] >> << University of Cincinnati Bitnet: wheeler@ucbeh >>