[CentOS] SPAM on the List

Steve Clark sclark at netwolves.com
Mon Jul 18 18:37:35 UTC 2011


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.

My $.02

Regards,
Steve

-- 
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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