distributed moderating

distributed moderating

[Joe Corneli]

Would it be possible to have people sign up for moderating duties
for the emacs lists?  The help-gnu-emacs and gnu-emacs-sources lists
are currently quite blocked up with spam.  If there are enough
moderators working in parallel for each list, legitimate email would
still get through quite quickly.

Re: distributed moderating

[Richard Stallman]

In a few weeks or months our sysadmins are supposed to switch
to Bayesian spam filtering, which I hope will get rid of much
of the spam.

Moderation by several people will only work if someone is prepared to
supervise the moderation activity and make sure it gets done each day,
reminding moderators and recruiting more of them as needed.
Otherwise, it's likely that many of them will drift away and that
messages won't get through.

Re: distributed moderating

[Joe Corneli]

   In a few weeks or months our sysadmins are supposed to switch
   to Bayesian spam filtering, which I hope will get rid of much
   of the spam.

OK, I don't know anything about the math here, but getting rid of
the spam would be great.

   Moderation by several people will only work if someone is prepared to
   supervise the moderation activity and make sure it gets done each day,
   reminding moderators and recruiting more of them as needed.
   Otherwise, it's likely that many of them will drift away and that
   messages won't get through.

The way I was thinking about it, everyone who had signed up to
receive email from the given list might be a moderator.  I haven't
got a good algorithm in mind that doesn't involve editing through
the web. But if the web was involved, people could flag messages as
"legitimate" or as "spam", at which point they would either be
released to the list or discarded.  If everyone who was signed up to
receive mail from the list was considered to be a moderator (in this
sense of the word) I think mail would go through pretty quickly.
But if an automatic filter works (as I imagine it should!) then such
outlandish measures wouldn't be called for.