On Thu, August 21, 1997 at 21:39:10 (-0700) [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: >Speaking at some possible peril to myself as a non-academic lurker, >I suggest that this list, whose server apparently is automatic, >is far too easily misused. Do we really want pyramid schemes >like #93 carefully explained to us on this list, as if they >were entirely new in concept? Actually, the level of SPAM on this list is remarkably low. We are lucky we haven't been hit more by this sort of junk. >Unless the moderator acts now to alter the means and standards of posting, >this list will soon go the way of Usenet, which is one ghastly fate. As Michael pointed out in May, stopping spam is difficult. Active moderation of this list would be quite time-consuming. I suggest a group effort on the part of PEN-L folks to investigate this topic. I posted a few resources for those interested, which I'll repeat here. You might visit CAUCE's (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) site at http://www.cauce.org/ or The Consumer Information Organization at http://consumer-info.org. My company, Dejanews, is working on making Usenet once again a livable place to have discussions. The technical issues are quite difficult---filtering works only to a degree, and moderation is expensive and/or time-consuming, even for a single list. The only way to address this, in my opinion, is to attack it legally. Even a simple requirement that all commercial postings or e-mail be reliably and "clearly" (to a computer) labeled would make the problem trivial to control with automatic filters. Bill
