On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 11:54:31AM -0800, Donald Becker wrote: > And except for a few weeks scattered over the history of the list, > I've been the sole or primary moderator.
Uh, sole moderator? Why is that? Surely there are dozens of long-time posters on the list who might be happy to spend a few minutes each day weeding through the email. What is stopping you from farming out human moderation to a much larger number of people? And what software do you use for managing the list? > The bottom line is that we are considering a message board format to > replace the mailing list. It would have required logins to > post, and retroactive moderation to delete advertising and trolls. > Any opinions? Yes: It's probably a bad idea. Some of the reasons why are touched on in this post I wrote recently: http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=389793 The OpenACS Forums package is pretty good, but I doubt you have any particular interest in supporting an OpenACS instance. Furthermore, although it has its own advantages, even the OpenACS Forums package is currently NOT a 100% suitable replacement for ANY mailing list, as unlike mailing lists, it is 100% centralized. Furthermore, although currently it would certainly cut it down, a web-based message board with required login would not eliminate spam. E.g., the Forums on openacs.org do get a small amount of spam. Some human moderation would still be necessary for the perfect spam prevention you seeek. I think we need a GREAT DEAL more info on the current managment of the email list and possible ways to improve it before a radical step like completely junking the email list in favor of a web-based BBoard is taken, or even seriously considered. I can think of a some possible tools off the top of my head, but I'm not sure how effective or practical each would be. For example, why can't some form of username/password login be supported in the existing mailing list? Certainly, if the mailing list's software supported it I could PGP sign all my emails to the list with my private key, and those should then be accepted automatically with no human intervention. Of course, it seems that would only really solve the problem if you made it strictly mandatory, which is probably completely impractical. Perhaps encryption isn't even necessary. Many of those web-backed BBoards don't even protect their login pages with SSL, so a mailing list could perhaps achieve a roughly similar level of security by requiring subscribers to insert a username/password pair into the headers of their email, which the mailing list software would then strip out. Hm, unfortunately Cc'ing emails to the list would tend to defeat that... How have other mailing lists handled the spam problem? What research has been done in this area? Who else might know? E.g., I wonder what tools and techniques Dan Bernstein uses, as he seems to maintain a bunch of email lists: http://cr.yp.to/lists.html I'm not familiar with this subject, and some quick searching doesn't find any discussion of good solutions. I'd like to know what else others have found, learned, or tried. -- Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.piskorski.com/ _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
