On Fri, 7 Jan 2000, Roger B.A. Klorese wrote:
> > Seriously, this is SOOOOOOOOO lame. These people are pretending to
> > be professional list administrators, and not only are they spamming
> > but they apparently can't be bothered with little things like, oh,
> > CONFIRMING list subscriptions before they finalize them.
>
> Do you force your list-managers to use confirmation? That is, is there
> some mechanism by which it is impossible for a list-manager to add an
> address unless there has been a user confirmation? I know of no product
> that will conform to this, Ron, so you might as well just pull yourself
> off the net.
I would, however, argue that in largely-unsupervised list hosting
situations such as eGroups/Onelist, there should be a 'self-ban' command,
which tells the listserver that you never want to be signed up for that
list again.
In other words, still allow the list admin to subscribe anyone, since too
many legitimate lists use it, and in the 'you joined' notice message,
offer not only a way to unsubscribe (since often times when they get the
unsubscribe notice, malicious users of those systems will simply
resubscribe you) but a way to say 'regardless of what the list admin says,
I want off this list permanently'.
Now, that may not be the most /elegant/ solution - it is something I
cooked up spur-of-the-moment as I read this message thread, and could
probably be improved upon - but from my point of view it seems to solve
both issues...not necessarily in the /best/ way, but it does solve them.
Another possibility, since I know Onelist and eGroups both store all list
subscriptions for an address in a single account, and you can set global
settings for yourself... why not have a setting on the account that says
'I want to /always/ be asked for confirmation, even if the list admin
subscribes me manually'?
Since I suspect most of us have, at one time or another, been on an
eGroups or Onelist list of some sort, that would also seem fairly trivial,
and if they included information about how to set that on yourself -
either in the 'you have been subscribed' message or on a website on their
page with a URL in the 'you have been subscribed' message - that would
seem to be another feasible solution.
Constructive brainstorming is always better than simply flaming people,
and may solve problems that were not originally seen. I know that
watching this has made me think about adding something similar to what I
describe above to the small list-hosting service JT and I are setting up.
:)
And should we really still be cc'ing [EMAIL PROTECTED] on this? :)
--
Jeremy Blackman - [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Lithtech Team, Monolith Productions -- http://www.lith.com
Listar Developer -- http://www.listar.org
