[Zope.Com Geeks] Re: [Zope-dev] zope-dev list policies

[Tim Peters]

[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.