The only way I know of is to form a "closed" group, where you create a
group, like through Yahoo groups, and require a membership to post.  And
someone is a designated moderator to screen out anything that might come
through.  But this is an open forum, so unfortunately there is no way that I
know of to moderate it.

Do as some of the others of us do:  Killfile the idiots, and when you see
something pertinent, post it.  It has weeded out the bickering and mindless
postings of at least two offenders, so it's much easier to read genuine
content without wading through their clutter.

I am not sure you want a moderator. how about a trip to pharmacy..?   If you
don't call anti bacteria meds and worms  and anti iron for asthma junk then
you do need your own group. According to Harvard researcher Schwartz, the Ne
is going to have the most  problems and pollution and global warming unless
more is done. One in four kids have asthma and most of them but not all of
them, is connected to environment. The number one cause of environmental
caused onset asthma is pollution. The cities who get the most asthma get the
most consistent days with particulate pollution. The regions that attract
the highest growth in housing is clean air cities in northwest. But heck
maybe you can find a group of kids taking anti bacteria meds and worms for
asthma instead.. I assume if you can't filter the threads here, your not
very good at determining what is junk or not.

I'm aware of another group that has two mods.  Let me see if I can get more
information.  I'd love to permanently get rid of these two idiots, but in
the meantime, see if you can change your settings to killfile them, as
ARoberts suggested.

Practially speaking probably not.

If this was a "Big 8" group (comp.*, rec.*, soc.*, talk.*, sci.*, news.*,
humanities.*, and misc.*) you could go to news.newsgroups (or one of those
sites) and submit an RFD (request for discussion) asking that the group
become moderated. They have changed the process for group formation and
change so I am not sure exactly what the process would be from there. If
that was successful you would need people (probably more than one) with the
time and ability to do it. The ability part would involve news accounts,
programming knowledge, and hardware that most people don't have. I
understand that some moderation is done on a PC with a windows based client
but this is exceptional. Usually, a unix based program is used and often a
seperate server is used or at least a PC with a partitioned drive. Even
having said all that the "newsgroupies" usually are reluctant to impose
moderation where it does not exist. You would have to demonstrate
overwhelming support from the group. They usually prefer to have you create
a second parallel moderated group.

However, we are not in the big 8. This is an alt. group. There is no council
of people who supervise what groups get created. Anyone can create a group
by sending a control message. The tricky part is getting system
administrators to carry the group. I could be wrong but I do not believe it
is possible to change the group's status once created and propagated. You
would basically have to create alt.support.asthma.moderated and get admin's
to carry it (and all the stuff above about moderation).

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/alt-creation-guide/
http://www.swcp.com/~dmckeon/mod-faq.html

Or you could visit the group alt.config and talk to them.

This is what I've learned.  We can't just ask for moderation because not all
usenet service providers honor those requests, and this is a usenet group.
There are two options.  One is, we can try to create another group which
would be moderated, and would be alt.support.asthma.moderated.  The other
option is to try to get a group created in the big 8 groups, which would be
called soc.asthma.support, and that would be moderated.  The procedure for
creating the latter can be found here:
http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=policies:creation

The moderator I spoke with is uncertain how to have an alt group created,
but would be willing to look into it for us if we're interested, and would
also offer support and help on the technical aspects of moderation if we
decide to move forward with either group.

OR we could just keep posting the instructions to killfile the fools.  Since
I did that I haven't had one of their posts polluting my newsgroup reader.