What indeed is involved in moderating all of these groups?

As a subscriber, you see very little of the real activity in any group. You may see the public issues that get posted. Messages are sent to the moderator; people wait a reasonable amount of time, some messages are then approved; and everybody on the group reads those. That is the simplest and the most professional aspect of the group.

You don't see the messages that are intentionally deleted. Unless you sent through a problematic posting, you don't know about those that are returned one or more times for corrections. You don't know about the questionable items that are put through for various subjective reasons. Nobody on the group ever knows about the queries or responses that are referred to professionals because of questions regarding their Jewish validity. Even those issues barely scratch the surface.

Wrong group

An important example is keeping track of which group each message is on. From time to time, somebody posts a message to one group, and a subscriber mistakenly responds on a different group. Since there are a great many groups in the series, it sometimes can be difficult to keep track of the issues. Sometimes, people even respond to issues that belong on a different series!

When the issue is clearly on the wrong group, there is less of a problem. However, there could be overlapping with some groups. For example, some Hebrew Computing and Jewish Computing messages could conceivably be placed on either one of the groups. There are cases in which the Jewish program for example is a Hebrew program and for this reason the issue could have been placed on both of them. This happened several times for example with Jewish calendar programs some of which are Hebrew or which have Jewish dates and it is difficult to keep track. These issues happen more often than people believe. There are other groups which have a grade level. For example, the Hebrew language groups have three levels. There is a more elementary Ivrit group, the larger and more advanced Hebrew Translating group, and finally there is a very advanced and limited Hebrewts group and some borderline discussions could really take place on any of these groups equally. The moderator of the groups has to keep track of all of these things.

There sometimes cases in which mistakes may be made, possibly because of tiredness or other reasons and messagse get posted to the wrong group in which case the necessary steps have to be taken to bring the discussion back to the correct group without hurting people.

In other cases messages move from one topic to another. As people respond the topic does change and it becomes relevant to a different group. Moving the discussion from one group to another group can sometimes be very difficult because some subscribers are offended that they have to join a different group in order to continue the discussion. This takes a great deal of tact but even with the most effort there may be people who are hurt.

There is more, of course. The messages go through so if one Internet service provider is not working properly then it is necessary to use another one even though it may cost more money for the duration of the time that one ISP is not working properly. It is also necessary to check in on the groups within several times during the day with only a reasonable time lapse between visits in order to maintain serious discussions or in order to handle urgent issues.

The bureaucratic issues are the most difficult and time-consuming. Theoretically everybody should be able to subscribe or unsubscribe or change their settings by themselves. However, a lot of people do need hand holding and the repeated work to help people with these things can be very difficult in many cases.

Then there are the people who want to get more information about the groups before they dare sign up. Still others may want to interview the moderator for local publications or radio stations.

Then there are issues in which subscribers are offended and it is necessary to calm them down, hopefully off-topic. Some subscribers have different agendas or different levels of Jewish observance. They may be offended that the level of observance under discussion goes against their own beliefs.