[CentOS] SPAM on the List

[夜神 岩男]

On Mon, 2011-07-18 at 10:54 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 7/18/2011 10:27 AM, 夜神 岩男 wrote:
> >
> >> (6) Having to visit a web site and then log-on if one wants to respond.
> >
> > I keychain the logins (I think most browsers have a function like this
> > now -- I think even elinks does, and elinks is a great way to browse
> > forums, btw) and don't worry too much with it after that.
> 
> 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 find this to be a *lot* less trouble than twisting my email setup into
> > something email was never intended to be.
> 
> Email wasn't intended for receiving messages and replying?  Hmmm...

It was designed precisely to do those things. What was described by the
previous poster was time consuming contrivances with the specific intent
of limiting the receipt of messages -- which is exactly half of the
specification as you stated it.

> > 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. Lists such as that got
swamped, and so did the servers, which made the whole system unweidly
(though news server networks are still run today and moderation via user
validation is still an option).

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.

>From an anti-spam/security perspective a post/fetch system is simply
more suitable for noise-free discourse than email. 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.

> 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.

-Iwao