Moderation and slight change of (de facto) policy

[Wildman]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2016 17:57:51 +0100, Tim Golden wrote:

> 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

How will this change affect posts to comp.lang.python?

-- 
<Wildman> GNU/Linux user #557453