On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 15:09, Steve Lamb wrote: > > You've been around long enough to know how things work. You know the > > project has a policy of open, non-moderated mailing lists. > > Yup. And I've made it well known I think it is a pretty dumb policy > for the reasons stated. > > > You also know > > that to change that policy you need to convince either the > > lists-masters or the project as a whole. Abusing the lists-masters on > > -user won't help. > > Yes, it does. As I told Anand a person who approaches them in > private has their voice squelched in private. A person who brings it out > in public and gets support from other people in public can start a > snow-ball effect of even greater public support. > > It's real easy to ignore a single voice in private. It's a lot > harder to ignore many voices in a public forum. > Certainly feel free to have the discussion in public, but keep it calm and rational.
Personal abuse of the listmasters won't help. Ever. If you can't discuss things in a calm and reasoned tone, then you will only alienate people, including potential supporters. > > Seriously, how much spam are you getting from debian-user? > > On a good day, about as equal to what makes it through my filters to > my inbox. On a bad day d-u is the major contributor to the spam that > makes it through my filters. > Now is this (i) spam as in unsolicited commercial/bulk email, (ii) noise as in clueless user looking for eg. windows help, (iii) noise as in clueless linux user "how do I ...", (iv) noise as in "that was asked and answered 3 times last week", (v) noise as in not this argument again? Personally I find the noise to be a big problem. But I don't believe that requiring subscription before posting will solve it. (I concede that it will help,) but I expect it would discourage the roughly the same proportion of (ii), (iii) and (iv). Each discouraged (iii) and (iv) is a potentially a lost user. I don't believe subscription will help with (v) (short of unsubscribing the offenders of course). > > Personally I like the fact that people can post from accounts which > > aren't subscribed. It's very convenient to be able to add a cc to > > another list to get an opinion on a issue from a specialised list. It > > makes it much easier to cope with debians 141 active lists[0]. > > Granted. So the question then becomes can there be a mechanism > provided that would allow such posts without open lists? For example > allow linked posting rights based on subscription to *a* mailing list > hosted at lists.debian.org if not the specific list being posted to? > That doesn't help with say, a GNU Classpath developer dealing with a bug which looks like its debian specific, and wanting to discuss it on debian-java. If you really want to see the current policy changed, then present a constructive, rational argument to the lists-masters and/or -project. eg. Gather statistics about how much spam gets through per day/week/month. Start a new thread titled eg. [VOTE] Should debian-user require subscription before posting. If you can gather enough (ie overwhelming) support, take the discussion to say -project, and try to convince the project as a whole. Personally I don't like your chances. -devel seems committed to open mailing lists. Andrew -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]