Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online
Depending on your software, it may or may not be easy to identify whether a particular newsgroup is moderated. Some news reading programs (like rn and tin) denote whether a group is moderated or not. If you see a notation such as Approved: in a Usenet article, you can safely assume that the group is moderated, too.
One way to make sure, of course, is to try to post an article to the group: if it's moderated, you'll see a brief note indicating that your article has actually been e-mailed to the newsgroup's moderator. Usually the mailing address of the moderator is based on the name of the group and is routed through a system called uunet.uu.net. For example, the newsgroup comp.sources.unix is moderated, and articles posted to that group are mailed electronically to comp-sources-unix@uunet.uu.net. The good news is that the news posting programs can e-mail your article to the right person without your having to remember any esoteric e-mail addresses at all.