Guest Editorial

MODERATOR RIGHTS, SUPER-BITCHES AND THE ZONE ONE ELECTION
Lesley-Dee Dylan, Lynn Gipson, and Ruth Argust

Last week, Joe Jared published an article in Fidonews which described what he feels is a political conspiracy in the SUPER-BITCH echo. As moderator of the Z1_POLITICAL echo, he further issued warnings to all the participants of SUPER-BITCH and requested a zone level feed cut of Ruth Argust based on posts in SUPER-BITCH.

The SUPER-BITCH echo is moderated by the Super-Bitches (Lynn Gipson, Ruth Argust and Lesley-Dee Dylan). Any attempt to moderate this message echo, by moderators of other echoes in their echoes, is an infringement of our rights and unacceptable to us.

From some of the comments in other areas about us, it would seem that the lurkers/visiting moderators have not read back far enough in the echo to get a true picture of our activities. If they had, they would have seen that we started off the election campaign with speculating about how interesting it could be if Tom Cole were nominated. Then Todd Cochrane stuck his foot in it - again and again and again.

As for any "conspiracy" of "henchmen" working to support the Douglas Myers campaign by attacking Todd Cochrane - Todd Cochrane is NOT Douglas's main competition. If you were reading this echo, you would know that we do not even consider Todd to have a viable campaign. Douglas's competition is from David Moufarrege and Dallas Hinton. There is very little interest in harrassing Dallas, and absolutely none in harrassing David.

Despite Joe Jared's claim that we "intended" to disrupt the Official Election Echo, there is not a single post where one person tells another to say anything in the Election Echo. There are discussions in the nature of "look at what idiocy Todd posted this time - what a dolt."

Our actions have taken place in the open. We are not "backroom" conspirators. Our echotag description tells everyone what we are up to. Our echo is backboned and available to anyone except Net 163, whose NEC refuses to carry it.

Joe has also placed all participants in the SUPER-BITCH echo on notice just because they associated with the so-called "guilty" parties.

Super-Bitch is a fun echo. We play in there. PLAY, not plot. Playing leads to a bonding, a friendship, a caring for each other, and an understanding of each other. We are not trying to overpower the democratic process. We do support Douglas Myer in his candidacy, because we have grown to like and understand him, despite his blue balls. If we were plotting and conspiring to do something unethical, we would have been doing so by mailing lists or crashed netmail.

Also, there is one other problem with the goings on in this election. Actions have been taken and warnings given, and one suspension, based on an anonymous accusation. It is a basic principle of British justice (on which the American justice system is based) that defendants have a right to face their accuser(s). We have not seen the accusation. We do not know, fully, what was in the accusation against us, or who accused us. We also know that the accusation was doctored up in such a way as to make it look like Jack Yates had said words that I had typed. The initials LD> were on the message Jack posted showing where he quoted me. These initials seem to have been deleted when these lines were put into the complaint. It also appears, from the small bits of the message that were cross-posted, that Jack's response to me was deleted, totally changing the perception of Jack's behaviour, and the perception of the nature of the entire echo. And Jack never said anything about Joe being Ross's puppet. I don't think anyone did, except the accuser.

I think Joe is looking in the wrong place for the conspiracies and dirty politics. He should be looking at whoever doctored up Jack's message and sent in the complaint. He should be looking at whoever it was who lied to him about Jack saying that Joe was Ross Cassell's puppet.

The rules allowing moderators unfettered rights to toss someone from their echos should be different for moderators of echos used for official FidoNet business, whether at the level of a net, region, or zone. Perhaps now is the time to start discussions of placing limits on the moderatorship of these official FidoNet echos.

Feed cuts on these official echos should never be issued unless the offender refuses to cooperate on read-only status. Even when a feed cut is issued, there should be no objection to a volunteer forwarding all posts in the echo to netmail so the offender can still read the echo.

When there are objections to the actions against an offender in an official echo, then there should be a review. Perhaps all moderators of backboned echos who are active participants in the echo could be asked to consult and make a decision on the validity of the action. This would be a one-warm-body, one vote review, rather than weighted by number of conferences moderated - i.e. Bob Moravsik would not get 350 votes to my one-third vote.