Regarding the mathematica newsgroup, I think that there may be only one moderator, but I think there are "friends of the newsgroup" who receive the (unedited) news feed before moderation, and can if they wish, respond directly to the person trying to post to the newgroup even before the post appears --- or insert an answer before another 12-24 hour gap. Thus the question can be answered, for the questioner, sooner than the full "mathgroup" cycle X 2.
Not knowing exactly when the moderator might check, I might be misreading the situation, but this is my suspicion. I think I have encountered similar situations on newgroups operated on behalf of users of Microsoft development tools, where key people (who know the answers) monitor the submissions for something that might be significant for Microsoft [e.g. a security flaw, or critical bug report], but otherwise do not go out of their way to help anyone. It is much cheaper to have newbie questions answered (even incorrectly) by other newbies, and eventually maybe the right answer will be supplied, at no cost to Microsoft, by someone who might know. (The Microsoft I was reading had to do with Speech and with Tablet PCs. I stopped reading them when I realized that -- as little as I knew about these development kits -- I knew much more than 95% of the people posting questions.) RJF On Aug 12, 6:58 am, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > Harald Schilly wrote: > > On Jul 24, 4:56 pm, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > >>> * Do new employees get the keys to the house on their first day? > >>> Not applicable. > >> It's worth pointing out here, although it's not the point the author > >> makes since there are (mostly) not "employees", that there is a > >> "quarantine" period at least on sage-devel before messages are allowed > >> to pass through unmoderated - is that still the case? > > > As a moderator I can say that this policy is really necessary because > > of the spam. you really don't wanna read it ;) > > Apart from that, every new poster is set to "always allow" after the > > first posting. So, he/she gets the key very soon! > > > H > > I realise this was written 3 weeks ago, but I could not resist the > temptation to reply. > > The Mathematica newsgroup comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica is moderated by > one person. He will not allow any other moderators. Not even Wolfram > Research staff can post to the newsgroup without his approval. Every > single message from every single WRI employee has to be vetted by him. > (And he rejects some of them if he thinks WRI would not appreciate them). > > IMHO, it is one of the most limiting things about that software. The > ability to post a question and get an answer is reasonable period of > time is important. Waiting 12-24 hours for the question to appear, then > another 12-24 hours before any answer becomes extremely tiresome if you > need to get a problems solved this month, rather than next year. > > Dave --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
