From: Bathsheba Grossman (sheba@bathsheba.com)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 20:18:49 EEST
On Wed, 14 May 2003, Charles Overy wrote:
> Subscription lists are fine for smaller groups but I think that, again, in
> the previous go discussion, it was determined that being ablt to post to
> the RP-ML without subscribing had some benefit. It was felt that it added a
> more open list with people outside the RP-ML community able to post, read
> etc. Perhaps we can no longer have this luxury, but without trying some
> other solutions I am not ready admint defeat.
Well, if you want to keep open postings, the only longterm solution is
either congressional legislation or hand moderation. Spam-busting
tools do some good, but they have a very limited half-life.
I don't recall a discussion of whether having open posting on the list
was a good idea (I ought to be searching the archives I suppose). For
my part I don't think it is.
It doesn't make any sense to me that people "outside the community"
should be able to post here. If they want to talk to us, shouldn't
they be listening? How would they have any sense of what the list is
about without reading it? What does a valuable posting from a
non-subscriber look like? Have there been any lately?
I don't see much upside, and the downside is huge.
> I agree with Doug and others that something needs to be done. Less noise
> and more signal will increase the value of the list.
> Just hitting delete doesn't cut it for me anymore.
I agree. No other list, of the few dozen I subscribe to, allows open
postings; and therefore none sends significant spam. (None allow
binaries, either, are we still allowing those?) These restrictions
are completely standard, and they're trivially easy to put in place.
It may have been normal to run more permissively when this list was
set up, but these policies are very unusual now.
Hannu, could you at least tell us why you're running the list without
these restrictions?
-Sheba
-- Bathsheba Grossman phone (831)429-8224, fax (831)460-1242 Sculpting geometry bathsheba.com Solidscape prototyping protoshape.com
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