Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
On February 26, 2020 3:05:22 PM UTC, Charles Plessy wrote: > >I sometimes wonder if adding a random delay of 1 to 24 h for every >message (I mean: rolling the dice again for each message) on -project, >-devel, -vote and similar lists could help to make us more resilient to >trolling and at the same time more likely to have more constructive >discussions. An interesting idea, but I fear it'd also lead to a lot of confusion. Delays would only apply to copies going through the list, in particular CCs to personal addresses would arrive immediately. Which means the people cc'd would get an early chance to reply (probably encouraging use of CCs). And those replies get sent to the list, also with a random delay, which could turn out to be shorter than the original message. That is, the reply could be "posted" before the replied-to. There would also be weird things like posts showing up past deadlines. If you want to be sure your post arrives by the end of the discussion period, need to send it 24h early. Making the list digest-only would accomplish some of the same things. (With all the well-known advantages and disadvantages of email digests, of course).
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
Le Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 06:48:44PM +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud a écrit : > > Email is by definition asynchronous, and some large delays (up to, say, 24h) > are IMHO clearly acceptable for our large, central lists such as -devel or - > project, if one's email address is not already known to send legitimate > content. I sometimes wonder if adding a random delay of 1 to 24 h for every message (I mean: rolling the dice again for each message) on -project, -devel, -vote and similar lists could help to make us more resilient to trolling and at the same time more likely to have more constructive discussions. I think that it would incentive people to spend more time to write well-thought answers, because it would reflect badly on posters of half-backed messages to have them delivered after well-written ones. As a consequence I also hope that it would also increase the diversity of opinions and posters by reducing the audience of fast writers – who still may end up broadcasted ~23 h after other people more lucky – and also by reducing time zone effects. There may be redundant answers but they might have the merit to present the same argument with a different point of view or a different background or vocabulary, and since they would be written independantly and without the purpose of supporting each other by sheer number, the redundancy would facilitate consensus building. Although the measure would not prevent trolls from posting, it would limit their capacity to induce heated ping-pong discussions in which upset people write things that they regret later because it irreversibly hurt others. Have a nice day, Charles (The idea of random delays is taken from the R posting guide https://www.r-project.org/posting-guide.html) -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Akano, Uruma, Okinawa, Japan
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
On Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 06:37 Geert Stappers wrote: > On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 08:55:18AM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote: > > Greetings, > > > > * Holger Wansing (hwans...@mailbox.org) wrote: > > > Geert Stappers wrote: > > > > Posting of subscriber with establish repuation > > > > go through without a delay. It skips "review queue" > > > > Sure. One thing that would be useful is to share a subscriber's reputation between mailing lists, that avoids the problem of having a high reputation on one list but still being delayed on another just because they didn't yet subscribe to the second list. This is similar to how stackexchange.com gives you 100 reputation when joining a site if you have sufficient reputation on another site. Jacob
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
Le dimanche, 23 février 2020, 18.48:44 h CET Didier 'OdyX' Raboud a écrit : > Le dimanche, 23 février 2020, 18.29:32 h CET Felix Lechner a écrit : > > > Do you really expect such a mechanism to be needed? > > > > Moderators have opinions. The mailing lists are our primary public > > forum. Feelings may run higher, and accusations may abound. > > It always seemed obvious; but for moderation to work while still standing > for our values, we need: … I figured I'd clarify. All of this is something we should aim for, not request as an upfront condition. What we need now is basically _any_ moderation, to put a halt to the ongoing abuse of our infrastructure. Frankly, I don't care the slightest if the system ends up blocking too many users or emails: it's not a free speech issue and there are tons of other avenues available to people with good intentions to reach out and discuss things about Debian. -- OdyX signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
Le dimanche, 23 février 2020, 18.29:32 h CET Felix Lechner a écrit : > > Do you really expect such a mechanism to be needed? > > Moderators have opinions. The mailing lists are our primary public > forum. Feelings may run higher, and accusations may abound. It always seemed obvious; but for moderation to work while still standing for our values, we need: - traceability (which moderator took which decision, when) - accountability (the moderators need to decide based on clear, published guidelines, that clarify which categories to moderate, and how) - transparency (allow senders to know if their mail is waiting for moderation, or was rejected; also probably publish numbers) - feedback (senders need to know _why_ their email was delayed or rejected, and be pointed to…) - a clear appeal process (super-moderators? review by 3 other moderators?) The point of an efficient moderation is to rule fast on clear categories: - allow obviously good email in; - reject (or hold) obviously bad email. … and to take the time needed for the non-obvious cases could require 2-3, or $n opinions. Email is by definition asynchronous, and some large delays (up to, say, 24h) are IMHO clearly acceptable for our large, central lists such as -devel or - project, if one's email address is not already known to send legitimate content. -- OdyX signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
Hi Philip, On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 8:55 AM Philip Hands wrote: > > Are you upset by the fact that quite a lot of spam is currently being > silently blocked, automatically? I suspect not. I am not upset about anything, but spam is not the problem. People fight too much, and they forget about Debian's goals [1]. > Do you really expect such a mechanism to be needed? Moderators have opinions. The mailing lists are our primary public forum. Feelings may run higher, and accusations may abound. Kind regards Felix Lechner [1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ap-manifesto.en.html#sA.1
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
Felix Lechner writes: > Hi Geert, > > On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 1:56 AM Geert Stappers wrote: >> >> Vision I have for a healthy ML is like nice village >> that is becoming a nice town. Citizens are aware it >> is their own habitat and it is their interrest to keep >> in a good shape. > > One person's vision often turns out to be another's horror. > >> Posting of subscriber with establish repuation >> go through without a delay. > > A review process after someone's posting received complaints would be > better. It should be public. Are you upset by the fact that quite a lot of spam is currently being silently blocked, automatically? I suspect not. I think this should be considered to be an additional measure that can be added to the current armoury of anti-abuse measures that are already in place. The thing that distinguishes this one is that a human gets to look at the mail, rather than it being automatically rejected. It ought to allow us to reject more abuse, without significantly increasing the false-positive rate. If you really think that we're going to have a problem with moderators blocking mails from real people who want to do constructive things related to Debian, then we could always include some sort of appeals mechanism for people that feel that they've had mails unfairly rejected. Do you really expect such a mechanism to be needed? Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg,GERMANY signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 07:13:55AM -0800, Felix Lechner wrote: > On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 1:56 AM Geert Stappers wrote: > > Posting of subscriber with establish repuation > > go through without a delay. > > A review process after someone's posting received complaints would be > better. It should be public. This does nothing to protect against somebody who's willing to create an arbitrarily large number of throwaway email addresses. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org]
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
Hi Geert, On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 1:56 AM Geert Stappers wrote: > > Vision I have for a healthy ML is like nice village > that is becoming a nice town. Citizens are aware it > is their own habitat and it is their interrest to keep > in a good shape. One person's vision often turns out to be another's horror. > Posting of subscriber with establish repuation > go through without a delay. A review process after someone's posting received complaints would be better. It should be public. Kind regards Felix Lechner
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
* Geert Stappers (stapp...@stappers.nl) wrote: > On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 08:55:18AM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote: > > Greetings, > > > > * Holger Wansing (hwans...@mailbox.org) wrote: > > > Geert Stappers wrote: > > > > Posting of subscriber with establish repuation > > > > go through without a delay. It skips "review queue" > > > > Sure. > > > > > > New subcribers will recieve postings. Their first > > > > posting gets a delay of N minutes. > > > > > > > > The delay has a time-out. If no-one approved a posting > > > > from the review queue, the posting goes through the ML. > > > > Such "time-out-expired posting" tells that the pool of > > > > moderators is too small. > > > > Interesting idea.. > > > > > > Please share your idea of such mailinglist features. > > > > > > The delay has to be something like 24h, not "N minutes". > > > Otherwise this is a too high burden for the moderators. > > > > Yeah, that doesn't strike me as a great approach either. > > :-) > > When I wrote 'N minutes', I was thinking "configuration item > in the manual page". Yes, delays will typically be > a multiple of 60 minutes. Yeah, these things often need configuration. :) > > The way this is handled in pglister (which is what the PostgreSQL.Org > > mailing lists use, and we throw quite a bit of mail around) > > I found https://gitlab.com/pglister/pglister Yup, that's it, and it's actively being used and developed. > > is that non-subscribers and/or non-whitelisted folks do go to > > moderation, but we have a number of moderators and we more-or-less > > randomly pick the first moderator to email, if the mail isn't moderated > > after 5 minutes or so, we randomly pick a different moderator to email, > > and so on. > > Nice algoritme, nice load-balancer. Thanks. > > We don't have any "automatically let the email through" option today, > > and we're pretty successfully able to moderate a lot of mail, let a > > lot of mail through, > > I do read "Many volunteers on guarding duty". > Yes, that is truely distributed moderation. More-or-less. > > and have very very little spam get through (the little it does > > happen is almost always due to a mistake by a moderator, which does > > happen from time to time, of course). > > Yes, human touch preferred. Yup. Thanks! Stephen signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 08:55:18AM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote: > Greetings, > > * Holger Wansing (hwans...@mailbox.org) wrote: > > Geert Stappers wrote: > > > Posting of subscriber with establish repuation > > > go through without a delay. It skips "review queue" > > Sure. > > > > New subcribers will recieve postings. Their first > > > posting gets a delay of N minutes. > > > > > > The delay has a time-out. If no-one approved a posting > > > from the review queue, the posting goes through the ML. > > > Such "time-out-expired posting" tells that the pool of > > > moderators is too small. > > Interesting idea.. > > > > Please share your idea of such mailinglist features. > > > > The delay has to be something like 24h, not "N minutes". > > Otherwise this is a too high burden for the moderators. > > Yeah, that doesn't strike me as a great approach either. :-) When I wrote 'N minutes', I was thinking "configuration item in the manual page". Yes, delays will typically be a multiple of 60 minutes. > > The way this is handled in pglister (which is what the PostgreSQL.Org > mailing lists use, and we throw quite a bit of mail around) I found https://gitlab.com/pglister/pglister > is that non-subscribers and/or non-whitelisted folks do go to > moderation, but we have a number of moderators and we more-or-less > randomly pick the first moderator to email, if the mail isn't moderated > after 5 minutes or so, we randomly pick a different moderator to email, > and so on. Nice algoritme, nice load-balancer. > We don't have any "automatically let the email through" option today, > and we're pretty successfully able to moderate a lot of mail, let a > lot of mail through, I do read "Many volunteers on guarding duty". Yes, that is truely distributed moderation. > and have very very little spam get through (the little it does > happen is almost always due to a mistake by a moderator, which does > happen from time to time, of course). Yes, human touch preferred. > Thanks, > Stephen Regards Geert Stappers -- Silence is hard to parse
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
On 2/23/20 6:48 AM, Geert Stappers wrote: Hi, I looking for ways to moderate a mailinglist distributed. Distributed as: serveral people do the job (not a job for a single person) Goal is a healthy (mailinglist) community. Vision I have for a healthy ML is like nice village that is becoming a nice town. Citizens are aware it is their own habitat and it is their interrest to keep in a good shape. Normal situation is lively communication on the ML. In abnormal situations gets toxic into the ML. That is what should be prevented. ML software can easily block non-subscriber postings. Software I'm looking for can delay postings based upon reputation from a subscriber. The delay allows the pool of moderators to review such posting. Posting of subscriber with establish repuation go through without a delay. It skips "review queue" New subcribers will recieve postings. Their first posting gets a delay of N minutes. The delay has a time-out. If no-one approved a posting from the review queue, the posting goes through the ML. Such "time-out-expired posting" tells that the pool of moderators is too small. Please share your idea of such mailinglist features. Foo is a placeholder We are familiar with a mailinglist like f...@lists.doman.tld Subscribe, Unsubscribe and other user requests go to foo-requ...@lists.domain.tld For the pool of moderators there is foo-rev...@lists.domain.tld where they can sent there approval (or disapproval) of postings that need review. Q: Which postings need review? A: Postings of subscribers without a established reputation. Q: How will moderators be informed about a posting needing review? A: By email from the mailinglist software at server. The moderator sends her/his judgement as a reply to foo-rev...@lists.domain.list ML S/W then distributes the posting to the whole ML (or drops the posting (like spam)) Moderators volunteer themself for the task and listmaster configures that at ML S/W. These are human actions by design. Q: Will a moderator see postings twice? A: Mostly no. Some, yes, the postings of reputation below threshold. Q: What about the regular ML subscribers? A: Yes, regular citizens. Regards Geert Stappers Pretty much any mailing list manager will let you do this. I personally swear by Sympa, but it tends to be overkill unless you're managing multiple lists. Mailman, ezmlm, etc. It all depends on how you set things up, and whether you put multiple names behind aliases like "listmaster." And then there are services like groups.io. Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. Yogi Berra Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why. ... unknown
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
Greetings, * Holger Wansing (hwans...@mailbox.org) wrote: > Geert Stappers wrote: > > Posting of subscriber with establish repuation > > go through without a delay. It skips "review queue" Sure. > > New subcribers will recieve postings. Their first > > posting gets a delay of N minutes. > > > > The delay has a time-out. If no-one approved a posting > > from the review queue, the posting goes through the ML. > > Such "time-out-expired posting" tells that the pool of > > moderators is too small. Interesting idea.. > > Please share your idea of such mailinglist features. > > The delay has to be something like 24h, not "N minutes". > Otherwise this is a too high burden for the moderators. Yeah, that doesn't strike me as a great approach either. The way this is handled in pglister (which is what the PostgreSQL.Org mailing lists use, and we throw quite a bit of mail around) is that non-subscribers and/or non-whitelisted folks do go to moderation, but we have a number of moderators and we more-or-less randomly pick the first moderator to email, if the mail isn't moderated after 5 minutes or so, we randomly pick a different moderator to email, and so on. We don't have any "automatically let the email through" option today, and we're pretty successfully able to moderate a lot of mail, let a lot of mail through, and have very very little spam get through (the little it does happen is almost always due to a mistake by a moderator, which does happen from time to time, of course). Thanks, Stephen signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
Hi, Geert Stappers wrote: > Posting of subscriber with establish repuation > go through without a delay. It skips "review queue" > > New subcribers will recieve postings. Their first > posting gets a delay of N minutes. > > The delay has a time-out. If no-one approved a posting > from the review queue, the posting goes through the ML. > Such "time-out-expired posting" tells that the pool of > moderators is too small. > > > Please share your idea of such mailinglist features. The delay has to be something like 24h, not "N minutes". Otherwise this is a too high burden for the moderators. If such 24h delay is not acceptable, the list should be moderated without such time-out (mails from non-subscribers are only going through to the list when a moderator accepts it), as it is widely common in the internet these days. Such was already proposed for the debian-www list by Steve McIntyre in december to deal with spam, and today I noticed that this is really needed: when I read that posting in december, it was not clear to me, but today I realized that my mail provider silently filters out most of the spam for me, so the amount of spam was hidden for my eyes. Until today, where I scrolled through the mailinglist archive and saw, how much spam the list gets! This should be considered unacceptable! So, yes, an infrastructure and team for list moderation should be created! If we accept spam and terror/harassment on our lists, we risk that too many people are ignoring the lists completely, and lower their Debian work to a minimum. Holger -- Holger Wansing PGP-Fingerprint: 496A C6E8 1442 4B34 8508 3529 59F1 87CA 156E B076
Re: distributed moderation of mailinglist
> > Hi, > > I looking for ways to moderate a mailinglist distributed. > Distributed as: serveral people do the job (not a job > for a single person) > > Goal is a healthy (mailinglist) community. > > > Vision I have for a healthy ML is like nice village > that is becoming a nice town. Citizens are aware it > is their own habitat and it is their interrest to keep > in a good shape. > > > Normal situation is lively communication on the ML. > > In abnormal situations gets toxic into the ML. > That is what should be prevented. > > > ML software can easily block non-subscriber postings. > > Software I'm looking for can delay postings based > upon reputation from a subscriber. The delay allows > the pool of moderators to review such posting. > > Posting of subscriber with establish repuation > go through without a delay. It skips "review queue" > > New subcribers will recieve postings. Their first > posting gets a delay of N minutes. > > The delay has a time-out. If no-one approved a posting > from the review queue, the posting goes through the ML. > Such "time-out-expired posting" tells that the pool of > moderators is too small. > > > Please share your idea of such mailinglist features. > Foo is a placeholder We are familiar with a mailinglist like f...@lists.doman.tld Subscribe, Unsubscribe and other user requests go to foo-requ...@lists.domain.tld For the pool of moderators there is foo-rev...@lists.domain.tld where they can sent there approval (or disapproval) of postings that need review. Q: Which postings need review? A: Postings of subscribers without a established reputation. Q: How will moderators be informed about a posting needing review? A: By email from the mailinglist software at server. The moderator sends her/his judgement as a reply to foo-rev...@lists.domain.list ML S/W then distributes the posting to the whole ML (or drops the posting (like spam)) Moderators volunteer themself for the task and listmaster configures that at ML S/W. These are human actions by design. Q: Will a moderator see postings twice? A: Mostly no. Some, yes, the postings of reputation below threshold. Q: What about the regular ML subscribers? A: Yes, regular citizens. Regards Geert Stappers -- Silence is hard to parse
distributed moderation of mailinglist
Hi, I looking for ways to moderate a mailinglist distributed. Distributed as: serveral people do the job (not a job for a single person) Goal is a healthy (mailinglist) community. Vision I have for a healthy ML is like nice village that is becoming a nice town. Citizens are aware it is their own habitat and it is their interrest to keep in a good shape. Normal situation is lively communication on the ML. In abnormal situations gets toxic into the ML. That is what should be prevented. ML software can easily block non-subscriber postings. Software I'm looking for can delay postings based upon reputation from a subscriber. The delay allows the pool of moderators to review such posting. Posting of subscriber with establish repuation go through without a delay. It skips "review queue" New subcribers will recieve postings. Their first posting gets a delay of N minutes. The delay has a time-out. If no-one approved a posting from the review queue, the posting goes through the ML. Such "time-out-expired posting" tells that the pool of moderators is too small. Please share your idea of such mailinglist features. Regards Geert Stappers -- Silence is hard to parse
