Moderation and slight change of (de facto) policy

[Matt Ruffalo]

Hi-

That seems like a reasonable approach, though I think there *really*
needs to be an option along the lines of "subscribed to the list for the
purposes of moderation, but not receiving list messages via email". I
think I did this with the Git mailing list in the past, and it was quite
useful. I prefer to read the mailing list over NNTP through Thunderbird
-- if I have to decide between receiving every mailing list message via
email, or not sending messages to the list, I'll probably decide to not
send anything to the list at all.

This is one of the reasons I'm not very active on this mailing list;
it's hard to effectively participate in a conversation when I know it
might be several hours or half a day before my message appears, and a
discussion will likely have changed enough in that time that a late
message may not be very useful.

MMR...

On 2016-04-17 12:57, 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