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

[Ken Manheimer]

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 at zope.com