moderation needed ?

[Steven_H Harwood]

> This newsgroup has been inundated over the past year or so with threads
> that narrowly border on virology, and have little scientific content. I
> specifically refer to the Ebola madness, and the current debate about
> vaccines and polio. Generally messages in these threads are crossposted to
> 10 or so other newsgroups, where the debate could more appropriately
> belong. I have noticed that the traffic about real virological issues (and
> this was a rather lively newsgroup with high scientific content) has also
> dropped significantly. This is unfortunate these two facts provide me with
> sufficient motivation to raise the subject of some kind of moderation
> again. Although I have no problem with laymens forums, and participate
> quite actively in some of those to provide the scientist perspective, I
> don't think that the bionet newsgroups should acoomodate those that want
> to discuss these issues. A similar trend could be observed in
> bionet.molbio.evolution, where people don't like to debate creationism. 
> 
> Any thoughts ?
> 
> -- 
> Marnix L. Bosch
> 
I rose this subject about a month ago.  I received 4 replies, three of 
which were not supportive of moderating the group, and one of which was 
generally supportive.  While it is easy enough to go through and weed out 
the posts that are not interesting, does the  volume of non-science 
(non-sense?) postings discourage discussion of relevant issues at a 
professional level?  Personally, I am willing to sit back and observe, 
especially given the response what was received when I raised the issue 
before.  Besides, NATO and the NIH might very well be trying to kill us 
all as one poster suggests ;>)

Steve Harwood> >