[Mailman-Developers] On allowing any list member to be an email moderator

[R. Bernstein]

Brad Knowles writes:
 > 	You can list as many moderators for a list as you like.

Fine. One just needs a way for people who are members of a list
to be able to volunteer to be a moderator.

 > 	But there's a problem with multiple moderators, one that we have 
 > on the mailman-users and mailman-developers lists ourselves -- in 
 > addition to many other lists hosted on python.org.  In short, the 
 > problem is getting all the moderators to follow the same moderation 
 > policy.

You are way too sophisticated. Again, we are talking about general
help, info, and user lists. The policy for all of these lists is
simple: if you think it's spam, discard. If not, accept.

So now let's go through the false-positive cases:

1. A post is not spam but is discarded. 

Not a big deal. For whatever reason the poster didn't manage to
convince the moderator it was not spam. The poster can join the list,
or try again and maybe another moderator will approve. This is an
improvement on the current situation cited where no posts go through.

2. A post is spam and let through. 

Still not a big deal. Recent versions allow for deleting archive
messages. Still there is the annoyance to others on the list for
getting unwanted spam. An obvious solution for someone annoyed would
be to volunteer to do some (or more) of the moderation of it. Or drop
out of the list. Still better than what happens now, which is
basically no posts get through and most certainly those that are
spam-infested either don't have any members or maybe they have their
own spam filters. 

 > 	No, there is no monitoring of the moderators 
 ...
 > 	The kind of monitoring you're talking about would add significant 
 > additional load ...

Okay. If nothing simple can be done, so be it. Personally, I think
just adding a button that allows a registered user to be a moderator
would grealy improve the situation described previously.  The problem
of getting humans to do moderation is not theoretical, but real. And
basically I think that a self-moderated system by users would largely
work. To some extent, I think this is proven by wikis.