usefor-article-04 April 2001

8.7.  Duties of a Moderator

   A Moderator receives news articles by email, decides whether to
   accept them and, if so, either injects them into the news stream or
   forwards them to further moderators.

   A moderator processes an article, as submitted to any newsgroup that
   he moderates, as follows:

   1. He decides, on the basis of whatever moderation policy applies to
      his group, whether to accept or reject the article. He MAY do this
      manually, or else partially or wholly with the aid of appropriate
      software for whose operation he is then responsible. He MAY modify
      the article if that is in accordance with the applicable
      moderation policy (and in particular he MAY remove redundant
      headers and add Comments and other informational headers). He MAY
      inform the poster as to whether the article has been accepted or
      rejected.

      If the article is rejected, then it fails for all the newsgroups
      for which it was intended (in particular the moderator SHOULD NOT
      resubmit the article, with a reduced Newsgroups header, to any
      remaining groups, especially if this will break any authentication
      checks present in the article). If the article is accepted, the
      moderator proceeds with the following steps.

   2. The Date header SHOULD be retained, except that if it is stale
      (5.1) for reasons understood by the moderator (e.g. delays in the
      moderation process) he MAY substitute the current date (but must
      then take responsibility for any loops that ensue). Any local
      headers (4.2.2.3) or variant headers (4.2.2.4) MUST be removed,
      except that a Path header MAY be truncated to only its pre-
      injection region (5.6.3).  Any Injector-Info header (6.19) or
      Complaints-To header (6.20) MUST be removed.
[Note several differences from Kent Landfield's 'Moderator's Handbook'.
The original Date and Message-ID are retained.
Any Distribution header is retained.
Any Sender header is retained.
Various other minor headers are retained (though the moderator MAY, of
course, remove them.
]

   3. He adds an Approved header (6.14) containing a mailbox identifying
      himself (or, if the article already contains an Approved header
      from another moderator, he adds that identifying information to
      it). He MAY also add further headers to authenticate that the
      article has been properly approved.
[That can be strengthened when we have defined proper authentication
mechanisms.]

   4. If the Newsgroups header contains further moderated newsgroups for
      which approval has not already been given, he forwards the article
      to the moderator of the leftmost such group (which, if this
      standard has been followed correctly, will always be the group
      immediately to the right of the group(s) for which he is
      responsible). However, he MUST NOT alter the order in which the
      newsgroups are listed in the Newsgroups header.

   5. Otherwise, he causes the article to be injected, having first
      observed all the duties of a posting agent (8.5).

        NOTE: This standard does not prescribe how the moderator or
        moderation policy for each newsgroup is established; rather it
        assumes that whatever agencies are responsible for the relevant
        network or hierarchy (1.1) will have made appropriate
        arrangements in that regard.

   It SHOULD be the case that articles will be received by the moderator
   encapsulated as an object of Content-Type application/news-
   transmission (8.2.2), or possibly encapsulated but without an
   explicit Content-Type header. In such a case, the complete article is
   immediately available for processing by the moderator.

   However, prior to the introduction of this standard, it was more
   common for injecting agents to transform proto-articles into mail
   messages, mixing the Netnews headers with the Mail headers.
   Moderators SHOULD therefore be prepared to accept submission in this
   format, although they need then to be aware of the Duties of an
   Incoming Gateway (8.8.2) (and, in particular, they SHOULD adopt the
   Message-ID and Date headers of the mail message, though they SHOULD
   NOT add any Sender header).