[forum] XFree86 forum, members only change, discuss

[Dr Andrew C Aitchison]

On Mon, 11 Apr 2005, William M. Quarles wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> The amount of spam on this list is disgusting.  It has gotten much worse
> as time has gone on.  Apparently this is due mostly to the fact that
> anyone can post to the list without enrolling.  I'm sure that there
> has been a very positive reason for this, but the spam on this list
> outnumbers the real e-mails 20 to 1 at least.  I think if we are going
> to keep this list going and be a viable forum we need to do one of two
> things:
> 
> 1. Seriously improve the spam filtering on the list (make sure to
> download the latest version of  Spam Assasin, and use some other
> service's better maintained Spam Assasin heuristics if necessary). OR

I see that we are running Spam Assassin v2.63 (2004-01-11)
(the current version is 3.0something) we should indeed update.
My impression is that forum gets more spam (as an absolute count)
than devel, but headers suggest that they do get the same filtering.

> 2. Close the list to non-members.

I'm not sure that the people who campaigned for open lists are still
here - I think they all disappeared (to Xorg ?).

However, I don't really see how forum would be viable if it were closed.
When it had a purpose it was for dialog with outsiders. IIRC when the big 
discussions were going on, third parties who were believed to have an
interest (like desktop environment developers) sometimes got CC'd.
They would be much less likely to reply if they had to subscribe to post.

> Let's discuss (since there hasn't been much discussion lately here).


> P.S. It is a little ridiculous how I had to take s u b s c r i b e and 
> its variants out of this message just to get it on the list. 

Are you saying that messages containing that word are considered to be
requests to join the list, or are the filtered some other way ?

> If we make it members-only we won't have to worry about
> spam filtering anymore really.

If joining is automated, we still have to worry, as spammers
have been know to subscribe especially. OK it reduces the quantity,
and probably makes it more targetted.

-- 
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison		Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
A.C.Aitchison@dpmms.cam.ac.uk	http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna