Moderation and slight change of (de facto) policy

[Tim Golden]

There's been a bit of chatter lately about the moderation on the Python 
List (and, indirectly, comp.lang.python). The list moderators have 
suspended a couple of posters for a while and we've been discussing a 
little our policy towards non-subscribed posts.

First, a quick summary of the current settings of the list:

* Any post from someone who's not subscribed to the list is held for 
moderation

* Subscribers are also held for moderation until a moderator clears that 
flag (which we usually do on the first post, unless there's some doubt). 
This is basically to prevent canny spammers from signing up and then 
posting garbage.

* There are a few other rules which will cause posts to be held for 
moderation: unduly large posts, certain odd headers, large-scale 
cross-posting, etc.

* All attachments are stripped

Exactly how held posts are handled is down to each moderator: generally, 
though, it's quite obvious as most spam is very blatant. Occasionally, 
of course, we have a post which borders on (or is clearly) 
objectionable, and we have to decide whether to reject it at source or 
to let it through and let the community deal.

Our approach to non-subscribed posts has been to let them through if 
they're clearly genuine, ie non-spam. However, as has been pointed out 
recently, this can quite easily result in useful advice falling on deaf 
ears. The OP isn't subscribed to the list, may not be reading it via 
gmane/ggroups etc. and may simply expect people to cc them directly. The 
list subscribers have no way of knowing whether someone's subscribed or 
not, so they reply to the List. And, of course, some people object to 
cc-ing individuals as well as the List.

Our new approach (from as soon as we set it up) will be to reject 
unsubscribed posts with a friendly message indicating how to subscribe. 
The only exception we expect to make is if we spot a regular subscriber 
who's come in on a different address for some reason (eg posting from a 
phone).

The main effect, we hope, will be that people asking questions actually 
see the answers. Of course, as we've seen in the past, some people will 
be confounded by the way in which a mailing list works (ie that they see 
all the chatter going through not just the answers to their question). 
But I don't see there's very much we can do about that except to help 
them to understand how it works.

In general, please feel free to feed back to the list owners. Like 
everyone around here, we're all volunteers so we can't guarantee to 
respond in any particular timeframe, but we'll try.

TJG