On 03/ 4/10 11:02 AM, Elaine Ashton wrote:
> On Mar 4, 2010, at 12:40 PM, Danek Duvall wrote:
>
>> Still, putting the messages into the moderation queue would be far
>> friendlier than bouncing them outright. The pkg-discuss moderation duties
>> are quite small, and the normal list traffic there is pretty sizeable. I
>> imagine moderating on-discuss wouldn't be a huge burden.
>>
> I keep traffic stats actually:
> Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul
> Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
> on-discuss 26 114 - - - - -
> - - - - - 140
> pkg-discuss 975 751 - - - - -
> - - - - - 1726
>
> There are a number of lists who bounce/reject email from the non-subscribed
> which, along with those that silently discard, are something I've been trying
> to discourage and even make policy discouraging it in the cases where general
> public participation is actively encouraged, e.g. web-side forums with
> gateways to mailing lists. But, I think in this case the point is well met
> that you should be in possession of enough technical prowess to understand
> both the need and the method for subscription. Reject or hold comes down to
> the semantics of who your audience/subscribers is/are and if you care that
> more people will be irate when rejected rather than held for moderation. It
> does tend to raise the bar on technical/dev lists.
>
> I think I've managed to reduce the amount of spam getting as far as the
> moderation queue to a minimum, with the exception of spam in French which
> always seems to go to indiana and cifs, which makes moderation less of a
> pointless chore for those who fear moderation would be a deluge of spam. And
> I clear the mod queue at least once a day...but I probably shouldn't admit to
> that in public. :)
>
> Those with one or more addresses who don't want to receive list mail can
> always either request a specific whitelist entry by the list owner or they
> can always subscribe and tick the 'no mail' box in their subscription
> management panel via the mailman web interface. I had no objections to
> specific username at domain whitelist entries in mailman, only the large
> blanket and, often wildly incorrect, sun.com whitelist entries.
>
Several lists have moderators that refuse to even consider such
whitelist entries, and have staunchly refused to consider leaving such
messages in a moderation queue. driver-discuss@ and laptop-discuss@ are
two examples. It had gotten to be such a PITA for me to deal with them
that I actually stopped contributing to those discussions for a while,
almost in protest of the draconian moderation (or lack of moderation)
policy.
I even offered to take over list moderation duties for those lists if
they would let me do so. Despite the fact that at one point I was one
of the most active participants in those fora, and am probably one of
the more active Core Contributors in both groups, they declined.
I wish you could educate some of the other "list moderators" about the
simplicity of handling a moderation queue.
I handle the oss (open sound system) list this way, and it really is
quite simple.
- Garrett
