[Mailman-Users] Restricting numbers of emails per thread

[stephen at xemacs.org]

Spyro Polymiadis writes:

 > We've got some ppl here that just post for the hell of it and just waste 
 > time in general, So we're looking at clamping down on some things..

This is a political problem; there are no technical solutions....

If you've got power or consensus that a limit is appropriate, moderate
the people who are abusing the consensus limits.  (I would guess
that's why this process got dubbed "moderation" in the first place.)
Go to the Membership Management pages, and click on the Moderate
Member button for members you don't trust to pace themselves.
Somebody will have to actually read and pass judgment on individual
posts, of course.

If you have a pretty substantial majority that will go along, but you
want things to look more "fair", you can moderate everybody (there's a
"moderate all" button at the bottom of the page).  This will require
substantially more effort from the moderator(s) to keep the desired
traffic flowing.

If you "can't just do things like that", you're probably going to need
to adjust the human relationships before anything effective can be
done.  Whatever you do will be called "censorship", no matter how fair
you think it is---the targets will know that you're aiming at them.
(At least they'll figure it out as soon as their post gets rejected!)

Anything automatic can be abused, too.  For example, a simple limit on
thread length could be imposed by counting the number of references in
the "References" header.  Then somebody who wants to have the last
word simply stuffs that header with bogus references to max out the
count.  Somebody willing to look like a jerk doesn't even have to know
how the References header works; they just do self-replies until
they've maxed out the thread.  Somebody who wants to reply to a
"closed" thread just truncates the References header to an acceptable
count.

If you keep state on the server, the "jerk" method (as well as more
subtle variants that would be harder to assign blame for) still
"works".