[Ken Manheimer]
I noticed this when it went initially went by, but didn't have time to follow up. The upshot is that there is absolutely no way *under the current arrangement* that this is going to happen. I can see a way to swing it, requiring earnest volunteer effort. Here are the details.
I think you have something different in mind than was being discussed. "Members only" comes in several flavors. You seem to have the "... and non-member posts are held for moderator review" flavor in mind. That wasn't suggested. Two other flavors were: - "... and non-member posts are rejected". No messages are held for moderator review then. A would-be poster with a legitimate email address gets an auto-generated rejection reply msg. Since most rejection msgs would go to bogus addresses on spam and virus email, m.z.o gets another bounce back for most attempts to send a rejection reply. - "... and non-member posts are discarded". No messages are held for moderator review then. Non-member posts go to the bit bucket, without comment or recourse.
Being the administrator of many of the zope lists (probably over ten and below twenty), i am already dismayed by the challenge of the typically thirty to one hundred held spam messages, bounces, and other effluvia i have to handle *per day*. I do not know how many of the legitimate list messages would additionally be held and require more attention (with the current mailman implementation, it takes a lot more fuss to approve a held message than to discard it), but the load is already untenable, so one more is too many.
There is an option, however. It's possible to add moderators to lists, separate from list administration privileges. I would be willing to set the lists to hold non-member postings, *if* there were volunteer moderators that would actually take care of some significant portion of the load - ie, i would not have to approve one non-member (alternate address) posting. (I would not mind occasionally approving a non-member/alt-addr posting if the volunteers reduced the spam/bounce handling efforts in the process.)
In my (limited but real <wink>) experience, this doesn't work. Without a single clear owner, postings held for review eventually grow to unmanageable bulk. Nobody enjoys the moderation task, it does consume time, and when there are multiple moderators they all eventually reach a point of believing that "someone else" can handle it for a while. After a few days go by like that, a co-moderator who is able to make some time logs in and finds such a backlog that they decide they have more urgent work to attend to. Then it snowballs out of control. We had a clear example of this about a month ago, when the backlog of python-help messages waiting for review reached thousands. At that point the only realistic option was to discard all of them, effectively making python-help the "... and non-member posts are discarded" list flavor. The only "... and non-member posts are held for review" list I moderate that works is the PSF Board mailing list. That works because I'm the only moderator, legit traffic on it is very light, and I know enough Visual Basic to automate the reject/approve process without leaving Outlook <wink>.
... That's the situation. Are there people that would be willing to volunteer for moderation duties? (Say which lists when you reply - and make sure to cc me directly, since i can't read most of the lists i moderate.)
The rub is that mailing lists are open 24 hours per day, 365.2425 days per year, and virus/spam traffic keeps increasing. Good intentions get crushed by that reality.
On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Tim Peters wrote:
[Ken Manheimer]
I noticed this when it went initially went by, but didn't have time to follow up. The upshot is that there is absolutely no way *under the current arrangement* that this is going to happen. I can see a way to swing it, requiring earnest volunteer effort. Here are the details.
I think you have something different in mind than was being discussed. "Members only" comes in several flavors. You seem to have the "... and non-member posts are held for moderator review" flavor in mind. That wasn't suggested. Two other flavors were:
- "... and non-member posts are rejected". No messages are held for moderator review then. A would-be poster with a legitimate email address gets an auto-generated rejection reply msg. Since most rejection msgs would go to bogus addresses on spam and virus email, m.z.o gets another bounce back for most attempts to send a rejection reply.
- "... and non-member posts are discarded". No messages are held for moderator review then. Non-member posts go to the bit bucket, without comment or recourse.
In either mode, essentially, list members would be able to get postings to the list only from their registered account. I don't have a confident guess about whether that would be prohibitive to any or many. I suppose we could try it and see whether how it sits with people. There's also the incidental considerations - both modes have drawbacks. As you point out, non-member-posting-rejection increases the incidental mail spew being sent to zope.org, not insignificantly. Non-member-posting-discard mode means some percentage of posters will have their postings discarded, and some percentage of those will fail to notice it never showed. I think that kind of failure mode leads to really bad, insidious problems, and don't think it's an acceptable kind of noise to put into a system, so i would be a solid -1 on it. So i could see giving a try to non-member-posts-rejected, if the membership thinks the added inconvenience is worth the reduced spam. I have the impression, though, that the spam on most of the high-traffic zope.org maillists is relatively low-proportion. Am i mistaken?
[...]
There is an option, however. It's possible to add moderators to lists, separate from list administration privileges. I would be willing to set the lists to hold non-member postings, *if* there were volunteer moderators that would actually take care of some significant portion of the load - ie, i would not have to approve one non-member (alternate
In my (limited but real <wink>) experience, this doesn't work. Without a single clear owner, postings held for review eventually grow to unmanageable bulk. Nobody enjoys the moderation task, it does consume time, and when there are multiple moderators they all eventually reach a point of believing that "someone else" can handle it for a while. After a few days go by like that, a co-moderator who is able to make some time logs in and finds such a backlog that they decide they have more urgent work to attend to. Then it snowballs out of control. We had a clear example of this about a month ago, when the backlog of python-help messages waiting for review reached thousands. At that point the only realistic option was to discard all of them, effectively making python-help the "... and non-member posts are discarded" list flavor.
Well, that's useful info.
The only "... and non-member posts are held for review" list I moderate that works is the PSF Board mailing list. That works because I'm the only moderator, legit traffic on it is very light, and I know enough Visual Basic to automate the reject/approve process without leaving Outlook <wink>.
Reject (actually, discard) is pretty easy - you just have to reply to a particular attachment in the held-message notice. (I **wish** the confirmation message for the discard would indicate that a discard happened - instead, it says "Confirmation succeeded", which is nearly worse than no feedback at all, because it sounds like my discard instrucation was taken as an approval. But i haven't taken the time to do anything about it, sigh.) Never tried approval-via-reply, since i'm afraid of screwing up the header, and mostly don't have to do emailled approvals, anyway. Ken klm@zope.com
[Ken Manheimer]
In either mode, essentially, list members would be able to get postings to the list only from their registered account.
Or accounts. When I've faced a list like this as a user, I've subscribed multiple times, once from each account I'm likely to post from, but set the "no delivery" option on all but the primary (IMO) subscription. This is something users can do on their own.
I don't have a confident guess about whether that would be prohibitive to any or many. I suppose we could try it and see whether how it sits with people.
So far, the people who post from only one account have insisted it won't make real trouble for anyone <wink>. I don't know how it works for people posting from gmane.
There's also the incidental considerations - both modes have drawbacks.
Yes, but all modes have drawbacks, including the status quo.
... So i could see giving a try to non-member-posts-rejected,
That would actually lighten *our* (list admin) loads. Nobody is sympathetic to that except us, of course. Even with the current "open list" policy, I still get a ridiculous number of messages held for review.
if the membership thinks the added inconvenience is worth the reduced spam.
There won't be consensus on this. "Votes" on zodb-dev have been about evenly split, and I don't expect that will change.
I have the impression, though, that the spam on most of the high-traffic zope.org maillists is relatively low-proportion. Am i mistaken?
No idea -- my personal SB filter spares me from seeing almost all junk email from all sources, and I get a few hundred of them per day. By far the biggest source is bounces to webmaster@python.org, due to viruses and spam forged to appear as if sent from webmaster@python.org. Compared to that load, every other source is in the noise for me.
... Reject (actually, discard) is pretty easy - you just have to reply to a particular attachment in the held-message notice.
Approval is the same process (at least under a current-enough Mailman), except you need to put an Approved: <list password> line in the headers, or as the body of the reply. My VBA code knows the list passwords for the various mailing lists, and discard/approve is just a matter of clicking a button for me (one button for discard, another for approve). It still takes real time to open and review the messages Mailman is asking about, though.
(I **wish** the confirmation message for the discard would indicate that a discard happened - instead, it says "Confirmation succeeded", which is nearly worse than no feedback at all, ...
Even worse, it says exactly the same thing for an approved message. But wouldn't Barry be a better recipient for this rant <wink>?
Quoting Tim Peters <tim@zope.com>:
No idea -- my personal SB filter spares me from seeing almost all junk email from all sources, and I get a few hundred of them per day. By far the biggest source is bounces to webmaster@python.org, due to viruses and spam forged to appear as if sent from webmaster@python.org. Compared to that load, every other source is in the noise for me.
Just a quick note. Even if all members use anti-spam software to solve their spam problems, spams will still reside in the archives and make there dirty -I beleive- almost forever (unless you install a spam-filter for the archives too) Mohsen,
participants (3)
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Ken Manheimer -
Mohsen Moeeni -
Tim Peters