[CentOS] SPAM on the List

Mon Jul 18 18:42:03 UTC 2011
Steve Clark <sclark at netwolves.com>

On 07/18/2011 02:37 PM, Steve Clark wrote:
> On 07/18/2011 01:00 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On 7/18/2011 11:25 AM, ?? ?? wrote:
>>>> So do you typically provide helpful answers to forum questions sooner
>>>> after they are posted when you have to forum-hop than you would if they
>>>> land in your inbox or later?
>>> Obviously some level of activity must be maintained within a community
>>> to ensure decent response times, but newer communities such as Ubuntu
>>> have found forums to be a fairly useful thing. The forum community there
>>> is doing well and questions get answered at a reasonable pace -- with
>>> the added benefit that when someone goes on vacation they have no box
>>> that needs filtering, unsubscribing, setting in a vacation state, etc.
>>> to protect from lists or spam. Outside of the tech world forums have
>>> proven themselves durable and usable for help and feedback purposes --
>>> overwhelmingly so.
>> I don't think Ubuntu is a reasonable project example unless you can come
>> up with a way to match it's resources, which I believe include paid
>> participants.  Who is going to hover over a forum waiting to answer
>> questions otherwise?
>>
>>>>> So... what is wrong with newsreaders? In my experience the provide all
>>>>> the benefits of email (speed, uniform interface, etc.) that you listed
>>>>> as well as all the benefits of a post/fetch paradigm that I get from
>>>>> forums without any of the hassles of either.
>>>> Interesting that you bring this up in the context of spam.  The problem
>>>> with net news is that all of the servers stopped handling it because of
>>>> the porn and copyright-infringing binaries postings that overwhelm it.
>>> Newsreaders require a news server. News servers can be run by anyone, it
>>> doesn't require a global cabal to serve news. In the later days of
>>> usenet it was overwhelmed by crap, largely because of the enormous
>>> number of groups created by people who didn't have time to maintain
>>> them, had a blanket anonymous publish policy, and eventually never
>>> showed back up to take care of their lists.
>> You make it sound accidental. That's not the way I remember it.
>>
>>> What I am describing is the running of a newsgroup server specific to a
>>> project or interest, say news.centos.org (or whatever for whatever).
>>> Initial validation would be required (not unusual for mailing lists) for
>>> initial posting, and after that unmoderated publication would be
>>> permitted by a validated user. This is a simple system. Disabling
>>> attachments and/or setting file/message size limits is trivial and is an
>>> action which occurs in just one place (the server) and doesn't bother
>>> the users.
>> So if you have 100 interests, you'd have to establish and maintain 100
>> logins and passwords - and configure them on every device/application
>> you use for access.  That's not my idea of convenience.
>>
>>>  From an anti-spam/security perspective a post/fetch system is simply
>>> more suitable for noise-free discourse than email.
>> I just don't see the distinction other than having more possibility of
>> after-the-fact cleanup before delivery - and then only if someone goes
>> to the trouble of doing it and you are slow in your fetching.
>>
>>> That we have
>>> forgotten that is likely more due to the timing of the web explosion in
>>> the early 90's and the tech/generation gap it produced than anything
>>> else.
>> Ummm, no.  There was always a lot more crap posted to usenet than there
>> is here.  Maybe you've forgotten that.
>>
>>>> A news service with censorship might be OK.  Until they censor something
>>>> that you wanted to say or see.  Forums with rss feeds might be a middle
>>>> ground to centralize the reading side but there's still the issue of
>>>> standardizing the forum interfaces so you don't have to figure out how
>>>> to reply again for every interesting topic.
>>> You have just described properly run newsgroups -- and why I am
>>> suggesting them as a reasonable course of action which would resolve
>>> spam issues not just within list, but limit everyone's exposure to spam
>>> in their general mail boxes.
>> The protocol for the transfer doesn't really matter here.  What you
>> propose isn't particularly different than setting up local email service
>> with accounts for all users for every list.  That is, it would be
>> equally inconvenient and not solve any of the underlying problems.
>>
> Hmm... I am on a number of ML one of which is LKML and I find the amount of spam is miniscule in comparison to the
> number of messages.
>
> Also trying to keep up with all the topics and new threads on any forum I have been on seems much more difficult than
> on any mailing list.
>
> I have thunderbird setup to read mail threaded and if its a thread I am not interested a simple CTL-t marks any new messages
> as read.
oops should have been just 't' not ctl-t.
-- 
Stephen Clark
*NetWolves*
Sr. Software Engineer III
Phone: 813-579-3200
Fax: 813-882-0209
Email: steve.clark at netwolves.com
http://www.netwolves.com
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