[Mailman-Users] Feature Request: Selective Mass Subscription

[Brad Knowles]

Hank van Cleef wrote:

> I am going to go on record as very strongly OPPOSED to removal of the
> "mass subscribe" feature.  We used it as the only method a new user
> can subscribe to the list.  

I know there are people who use it responsibly, which is why I don't 
advocate too strongly for its removal.  But that doesn't mean that it 
doesn't get abused, or that we shouldn't do things to try to curb that abuse.

> I don't know what you did at AOL, but I'm here to tell you that AOL in
> general was one big headache right from the get-go, and the source of
> many disguised attempts to thwart our subscription policies.  We're
> down to two AOL subscribers who are very well known to the moderators.

I mostly managed the Internet e-mail gateway system at AOL, but as an 
old-hand Unix user myself (going back to 1984), I actively tried to get 
everyone I knew to stop using the AOL client.  It tries to make things too 
easy for the newbie to do, and in the meanwhile it makes things harder for 
the more computer-savvy user.

Most importantly, because they make it trivially easy to hit the "report as 
spam" button and they don't spank the crap out of their users who abuse this 
feature, they really make it much more difficult for the rest of us.

Read all of the items in the FAQ that mention AOL.  Every single one of them 
is negative with respect to AOL, and I wrote or edited them all.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>