Re. the debate over archiving killed msgs. Jeremy wrote, >>The killed messages from the trial period are in the SCREEN-L archives >>currently. If we continued to go with moderating, though, I will *not* >>be able to store the killed messages on an ongoing basis. When a message >>gets killed it'll just be dead dead dead. And Dr. Missy replied, >Normally this wouldn't bother me. But, what about some type of >statistical notation of how many killed messages there were... and for >what reason? I guess I just don't understand people's desire to see the killed msgs; it seems motivated by a mistaken notion that there are conspiracies lurking in the interstices of the net. It seems to me that most of those msgs are deeply uninteresting -- and the ones that aren't, the ones that actually are relevant to a discussion of "censorship" or whatever, usually make it onto the list in some form or another, b/c the indignant writer finds a way to get the issue out. A few years back, I posted a note to one list that had a cuss word in a quotation to which I referred; the moderator deleted the offending naughty bit. I then posted a note to the list about the editing, which the moderator happily passed along with an appended note about why he did what he did. No muss, no fuss: everyone on the list got to see what happened, and major constitutional calamities were avoided. To me (a moderator of H-Mac, btw), the idea of archiving killed msgs for general use is a waste of moderator time and disk space. 99% of those msgs are silly, useless, uninteresting -- and then there's the 1% that might be of some value to conspiracy theorists. But the desire to archive the killed msgs seems to presuppose a structural mistrust of moderators. Admittedly, what a moderator thinks is smoothing out the functioning of a list may be more problematic to someone else. But no moderator wants to instigate a war around censorship and would be happy most times to let the list wrangle with the tough calls. Remember, this very discussion was instigated by Jeremy himself. Do we really need to have an internal affairs mechanism to check up on him? I think not. So, as you can imagine, the idea of asking a moderator to do statistical analysis on killed msgs seems absurd to me. Look: if a major concern arises, we'll deal with it. Meanwhile, this list ain't broke. Chris Amirault.......................Dept. of American Civilization Moderator, H-Mac.........................Brown University Box 1892 Chris_Amirault@brown.edu.......................Providence RI 02912