Re: List membership

"William M. Quarles" <walrus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> · Tue, 19 Apr 2005 19:02:57 -0400

Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, William M. Quarles wrote:
OK, I am told to go to hell basically because I don't like the spam on 
this list that makes it through XFree86's Spam Assasin, my ISP's filter, 
and my personal Mozilla filter. 

If you thought I said that I am sorry; I certainly didn't mean to.

No, it wasn't you, it was Marc Aurele La France
I propose making the list members-only 

posts and I get told why it can't be that way.

I'm sorry if my confusion misled you.

It seems that the list is neither open nor closed, but has a 
machine-controlled middle way of some sort.

I'm not confused, it used to be that anyone could post the list without 
being subscribed.  I posted to the list myself once before I subscribed 
and it went through.  Stupid part about them doing that is that this 
list fills in the "Reply-To" header, so that off-list person would never 
see a response to that message.  Someone closed it off for good reason 
(spam).  It just hasn't seem to do a lot of good.  I find it funny that 
the other XFree86 lists are getting it, too.  It makes me question the 
organization.
I decide to sign off from the list and send a message through Gmane.  I 
get a message back saying that my post was not allowed because I am a 
non-member.  So I guess all of the spammers are members?  Nice.

The list appears to be automatic signup; as I suggested in my previous 
mail, the spam merchants know how to sign up to such email lists.

Automatic signup seems appropriate to me for a list where we are

interested comments from "non-members"

I still had to verify my e-mail address, which is usually more than a 
spammer is usually willing to do (but you can't put anything past them).
(I'm thinking of the gui/window-manager/desktop environment people
who were originally the people who had a different take on where we
should be heading). Having a person approving list membership
asks for delays (they do need to sleep and have a day or two away
from email) and could leave us open to charges of censorship.

I've never had to have approval to sign up for any of the lists that I 
am signed up for, and I am signed up for like 10 of them.  I've received 
a total of one spam message on a list other than this one in the five 
years that I have been using GNU/Linux.
However, given the lack of response from anyone running the list
(and thus capable of upgrading spamassassin) we are wasting our time
discussing this.

I got the impression that the Marc fellow was high up on the food chain. 
 He's probably ignoring all of my threads now anyway.
The list has had no content (I see this as meta-content) for a year
or two, so I propose that we just close it down. Since the managers
don't read the list I don't expect this to happen.

Heh, this might get me started on the license again, look out.
William
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