History and Purposes
Moderating a newsgroup consists of reviewing every message before the message can go out to Usenet as a whole. While a time-consuming practice, it has long been one of the most effective ways of guaranteeing that there really is content in a newsgroup, keeping out those that wish to disrupt the group, and generally allowing Usenet to function efficiently.

Unfortunately, it's also a major time-sink, a time-honored way to make a lot of people think you're a censor, and, if done poorly, the surest way to kill a newsgroup for good.

The Usenet Volunteer Moderators were formed in response to these problems. Most of the work of being a moderator can be done with moderation 'bots and scripts, if those doing the work know how to do set them up - that can take care of the time problem, at least in the short-run. Those people that would volunteer to moderate somebody else's group are generally already used to being called censors - what more damage can be caused by one newsgroup? And, by ensuring that the moderators are in some way knowledgeble of Usenet and giving a source of backup moderators if necessary, the chances of the death of the newsgroup can be reduced to virtually nothing.

And, in the mean time, it offers a great place for potential moderators to learn the trade.

Guidelines for Assistance
The UVM will attempt to moderate any newsgroup that requests the assistance. They will do so in an impartial manner, following their interpretation of the newsgroup charter.

The UVM is, of course, staffed only by volunteers; because there are no minimum obligations to join, there is no guarantee that anybody will choose to moderate any particular newsgroup. The best way to guarantee that a UVM member will moderate a newsgroup is to keep the moderation simple and non-content based. Some restrictions that should be acceptable:

• Crosspost limitations (no crossposts to more than X newsgroups).
  
• Required subject line tags.
  
• Maximum line lengths.
  
• Munged/unmunged email addresses.
  
• Simple spam filters.
  
• Binary/HTML post filtering.
  
• Autoapprove lists.
  

Guidelines for Membership
There are very few restrictions upon membership in the UVM. The foremost are simple technical restictions - to be a member you have to have the technical resources and knowledge required to moderate a newsgroup (a permanent net connection, access and knowledge of moderation software, enough time to spend keeping your groups going).

Mailing List
The Usenet Volunteer Moderators are mostly organized through a mailing list. If you'd like to subscribe, whether to join or to listen in, send mail to majordomo@eyrie.org with the body:

subscribe uvm your@email.address.here