STUMP Robomoderator Program

``Making Moderation Easy''

Also: Algebra homework help, History of Algebra, see my Webster Dictionary with pronunciation. Some people use English/Russian Translation outfit.

STUMP means Secure Team-based Usenet Moderation Program. STUMP is currently working in production and is stable. The robomoderator code is portable and configurable and is publicly available for moderator teams on USENET for free.

Test Drive It

If you want to propose a newsgroup, click here.

Even though STUMP is FREE, and there is a unrestricted mailing list for STUMP support, we offer commercial site hosting. It means that if you do not want to deal with Unix-based stuff, we'll set it up for you on a centrally managed server. We provide you with a service guarantee and give you an easy to use web interface for moderation.
Click here for more information

Moderation of picture newsgroups: Users of ReadySTUMP can now moderate newsgroups with pictures. Articles with embedded pictures (uuencoded or MIME) will be displayed properly (as graphical images) to the moderators. That makes it possible to create moderated newsgroups with pictures and moderate them easily. At the moment, I limited this service to users of ReadySTUMP, for technical reasons. If you are interested in creating a moderated picture newsgroup click here.

There is a List of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). STUMP is currently used by the following newsgroups:

soc.culture.russian.moderated . (uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
soc.religion.paganism .
(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
misc.invest.financial-plan

(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
soc.cupport.aids-hiv+

(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
comp.os.ms-windows.win95.moderated
soc.culture.african.american.moderated
soc.culture.galiza
alt.religion.home-church
alt.culture.malta
crha.announce and crha.whatsnew, etc
rec.food.cuisine.jewish
rec.martial-arts.moderated
soc.sexuality.general
rec.gambling.blackjack.moderated
mensa.talk.misc
mensa.au.announce and mensa.au.events (see their home page http://www.au.mensa.org/newsgroups.html).
Several local WebTV newsgroups
rec.bicycles.off-road
alt.toys.transformers.classical.moderated
rec.sports.pro-wrestling.moderated
alt.sexual.abuse.recovery.moderated

(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
alt.religion.wicca.moderated

(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
alt.music.weird
rec.humor.jewish
uk.business.telework
alt.business.telemarketing
alt.radio.talk.wattenburg
rec.arts.comics.reviews
soc.culture.indian.kerala.moderated
rec.autos.sport.nascar.moderated
alt.music.weird
misc.kids.moderated and Warren Delaney's Site.
alt.activism.eco-action
alt.sex.stories.gay.moderated
.
(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
soc.politics.marxism
alt.life.sucks.moderated
soc.culture.spain
uk.environment(?)
comp.emulators.announce
alt.astrology.moderated
.
(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
Here's an interesting story: alt.astrology.moderated was created at the exactly the astrologically correct time, 12:04am on November 8th. I could do it so precisely because my computer is connected to an atomic clock via NTP protocol.
alt.math.moderated -- moderated by Nick Halloway.
alt.binaries.celebrities.fake.moderated
.
(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
alt.support.depression.recovery.sanctuary
.
(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
alt.support.childfree.moderated
.
(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
soc.culture.ethiopia.moderated
alt.shoe.lesbians.moderated
rec.arts.comics.reviews
alt.parenting.attachment
.
soc.religion.sikhism(?)
bocconi.personale.comunicazioni(?)
alt.nl.gaycafe.sportief
.
(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
es.charla.politica.izquierdaunida
.
(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
sybase.public.y2k
.
(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
alt.religion.judaism.orthodox
.
(uses ReadySTUMP moderation site hosting)
bionet.audiology
bionet.drosophila
bionet.jobs.offered
bionet.molbio.embldatabank
bionet.mycology
bionet.parasitology
bionet.sci-resources
bionet.software.acedb
bionet.software.srs
bionet.software.www
bionet.toxicology
bionet.women-in-bio
chile.grupos.anuncios
dk.admin.opslag

STUMP is more than just a program. It is also my commitment to support and maintain it and its users in the best way possible. It is also a community of existing users who can help you with their advice. My goal is to keep STUMP the most flexible, easiest to use for human moderators, and most full featured package available. I actively solicit you to make your suggestions to improve STUMP, and welcome any and all criticism.

Basic features of the Robomoderator

Can run on any Unix. Moderators can use Unix, Windows and Mac, and AOL, and generally can do their job as long as they are able to read email.

Web-based moderation ( Test Drive It) is also possible. It can be done by moderators even without knowledge of CGI or access to a CGI-enabled Web server -- a centrally managed server is available as well as the ability to set up your own webservers if you want to.

Documentation is available in WWW form. (see Instructions below)

User support available through stump-users mailing list.

Extremely versatile but easy configuration management.

Support for group moderation -- multiple human moderators, which are randomly chosen for every incoming message that needs to be reviewed.

Automatic rejection of nonconforming messages, for example megacrossposts and encoded binaries are rejected automatically without human intervention.

Support of a preapproved list of posters whose posts are presumed to be good and do not need human review. It can help the moderator team to save their time and speed up posts by frequent posters. In practice, about 80% of moderators' time can be saved with this feature.

Everything is archived. Achives may be presented as WWW Pages like this.

Exchange between human moderators and robomod program is secured by PGP encryption and signatures. It prevents any "spoofing" of the robomoderator, when malicious users try to simulate fake moderators' approvals. This security is provided internally by perl scripts, and human moderators need not bother - everything is done for them.

Acknowledgments of receipt, rejection messages with explanations (standardized or supplied by human moderators) are sent back to posters.

All approved articles are digitally signed by PMApp program by Greg Rose. It provides positive and reliable identification of forgeries and unapproved posts. A daemon program is provided that looks for all unauthorized posts and deletes them automatically.
Note that these signatures are placed in the header of the post and they do not clutter the actual text of the messages. These scripts also provide protectin from subtle impersonation attacks described by Dr. Vulis.

Some posters may request additional protection from forgeries.

Support for a moderators'-only mailing list. This is nice for newsgroups that have more than one moderator.

Typical Setups Supported

STUMP supports the following typical configurations of robomoderator programs:

"Technical": Posts from all posters are approved automatically by default, but posts from a selected group of people are forwarded to human moderators for review. There are several "suspicious" words which also trigger forwarding an article to a human moderator for review.
This configuration is good for a technical newsgroup suffering from a small number of net abusers. For example, it could be useful for sci.physics or comp.lang.ada.
"Announce" or "Culture": Each submission triggers a reply with a FAQ (or any other text). All submissions are forwarded to a human moderator for review, but some posters are preapproved. Some posters may voluntarily request the robomoderator to accept only PGP signed articles. This configuration is good for an *.announce newsgroup where integrity and authentication are very important or a soc.culture.* newsgroup severely invaded by flamers, trollers, and forgers.
"Religious": Everything goes as long as it is not crossposted to any other group.
This configuration is good for a small cultural or religious newsgroup that offers freedom of speech but does not want any crossposted flames.

We shall note that the configurations above can be easily changed by changing contents of certain data files, and elements of these configurations can be intermixed (i.e., any newsgroup may restrict the number of crossposts or choose to send FAQ to posters).

Specification and Basic Concepts

Installation Instructions

FAQ

There is a List of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). This is NOT a FAQ about installation, but rather a list of more general questions.

ReadySTUMP worry-free moderation site hosting

For Proponents

If you want to propose a newsgroup, click here.

Downloading

You can download sources of STUMP from my FTP site

STUMP v.2.3:
STUMP_2_5.tar.gz
WebSTUMP:
webstump.tar.gz
Useful Precompiled Binaries for Linux and FreeBSD:
binaries.tar.gz

Acknowledgments

I must express my gratitude to (in aplhabetical order)

Stephen R. van den Berg at RWTH-Aachen, Germany, for his procmail utility.
Greg Rose, author of PMApp, a program for signing News articles with their headers.
soc.culture.russian readers for their criticism, suggestions and support.
Leonid Umantsev, for his checkquote program that verifies excessive quoting not allowed by SCRM's charter.

Russian Translation USA.
Professional technical and commercial French translation services.

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