Re: Let's shut down

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Morning, Richard!

On Sun, 11 Dec 2005, Richard M. Stallman wrote:

>    gnu.emacs.bug is supposedly a moderated newsgroup.

>Where does it say that?  This group is not moderated, and never was.

Hmmm.  It's certainly moderated at my ISP's server, and all posts I've
ever seen sport the header:

    Approved: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org     ; more recent

or

    Approved: bug-gnu-emacs-request@mail.gnu.org   ; more ancient

.  In fact, the changeover from the older to the newer form happened on
"Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 19:58:54 +0100", with "From: "Thilo A. Coblenzer"
<Thilo@Coblenzer.de>", "Subject: tex-dvi-view-command".  :-)

>    In years past, I actually used gnu.emacs.bug a fair amount to report
>    bugs and submit feature requests.  If I were just getting into Emacs
>    now, I doubt I'd bother, given the state of this newsgroup.

>I can see why you might hesitate to _read_ a list with a lot of spam,
>but why, rationally, would the amount of spam affect your decision to
>post to the list?  I don't see how it makes any difference.

It's more an emotional than a rational thing:  a repugnance at mixing in
with all the filth.  Also a feeling that nobody gives a damn about the
newsgroup, and it'd be a waste of time to post there.  (Yes, _I_ know
that Emacs developers take the list seriously, but a newbie might not.)
Submitting a bug report, especially ones _first_ bug report, is time
consuming and nerve wracking.

>The list still does its job.  I continue to receive this list, and
>when a useful but report or suggestion comes along, I DTRT with it.
>There is no reason for people to stop posting to it.

I still read it too, sort of.  But I find I'm only seeing proper posts
just after clearing out spam, which I do, perhaps every two to six weeks.

>Reducing the spam would be useful.  One thing we could do to reduce
>the spam is set things up to reject messages which fail to contain
>"emacs" in the subject or body.  If these rejections send back an
>auto-reply telling real users what to do, it should not be an
>inconvenience.

Probably the most effective simple measure would be to block everything
whose subject line starts with "?$B".

>    In September, I sent an email to postmaster@gnu.org

>I don't think anyone reads mail to postmaster any more.  I was told,
>several years ago, that this was a general practice on the net.

Ah!  :-(

>     offering to do manual moderation of help-gnu-emacs.

>I did not know about your request.  I might want to take you up on it,
>but first let's consider that automatic method.

OK:  Here is my suggestion again:

The sort of process I envisage would work something like this:
(i) Mail arriving at the list goes through the (presumably already
installed) automatic filter (Spamassassin?).
(ii) Of what's left, anything from a known serious poster passes through.
(iii) Anything which is a response to an existing article passes through.
(iv) The rest stays in limbo for up to 24 hours; during that time, a
moderator may accept it or reject it;
(v) After 24 hours (moderator on holiday?) articles will get passed
through to the list.

Given that I'm going through the motions anyway (on my own personal
archive), why not do the same on the mail server via SSH, so that
everybody gets the benefit?  Filtering ~20 spams per day, no matter how
repulsive, isn't _that_ onerous.  And with, say, 3 moderators, 8 time
zones apart on the world, the delay to serious posts would be barely
noticeable.

-- 
Alan.