[Mailman-Developers] Yet another weird-a$$ potential attack problem...

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 4/5/02 8:48 PM, "Marc MERLIN" <marc_news@vasoftware.com> wrote:


>> Pl unsubscribe my email address from your list with imm effect
>> failingwhich I will be contrained to initiate appropriate legal action as
>> may be advised.
> 
> Right...

Heh. 

I finally changed the standard footer on all of my list messages. It now
says:

Do not post administrative requests to the list. They will be ignored.

This goes on every message. It's dropped the number of these damn things to
about two a month. Even better, I've only had one guy repeat the request
(IMHO, the other subscribers of the list are more than happy to point this
out to the people. I, as list mom, overtly ignore them. Except for the
occasional grimace or grin)

And believe it or nor, I agonized over the wording for days. Was I getting
in the face of the "good"  users to try to reach the others? Should it be
stern and firm? Or more friendly? Should we use the word "please"?

One of the things I've gotten real sensitive to the last couple of years is
the issue of how things are seen by the "regular" users. You sometimes get
so focussed on "solving a problem" that you can piss off the people who
aren't causing the problem in the first place; sort of like spam blocking.
Some folks get so gung ho about blocking spam they forget that they need to
let the REAL stuff through, and don't think about the obverse problem of
false positives (the ultimate spam blocker: turn off your mail system. But
even the most rabid whitelister won't go that far...)

I finally decided that saying "please do not..." made it sound too much like
an optional request. I decided to risk irritating a few users by being
brusque in return for removing the ambiguity. It turns out my users have
accepted it with effectively no complaints (and a few accolades, since
they're tired of it, too). I just decided that we'd hit a point where you
couldn't assume users knew better (actually, we hit that point long ago, I
finally hit a point where I was tired of explaining it). And it's clearly
helped. 

There's always going to be a small percentage of people who can't/won't
follow instructions. I always boggle at how ahrd people will work to avoid
doing the easy thing (like follow the instructions). With legal threats, I
like to respond with "I'd rather solve the problem, but since you've made a
legal threat, I must request all further correspondence be done by your
lawyer to our lawyer. This will make removing you from the list very slow,
since our lawyers don't have access to the subscriber lists, but if that's
what you want, that's how we'll do it".

The responses are usually amusing. I've yet to have one get to a lawyer,
either. Although someday, I'ms ure I'll find one.





-- 
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/

No! No! Dead girl, OFF the table! -- Shrek