Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam (was: EuroPython 2020: Data Science Track)

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 6:40 PM Christian Heimes <christian at python.org> wrote:
> I'm not disputing the fact that a conference can use the generic Python
> users list for announcements. It's the fact that EP is literally
> spamming the list with threads like "Opening our merchandise shop",
> "Find a new job", "Introducing our diamond sponsor", and "Presenting our
> conference booklet". That's just spam to advertise for the conference or
> a company. Some EP announcements were cross-posted to multiple mailing
> lists like psf-community at python.org, too.

Five threads in a month isn't THAT much spam. Yes, four of them
arrived close together, but that's what happens when something is
temporal in nature. We've had roughly the same number of threads
saying "Python v3.x.y has been released" referencing small revisions
to stable releases of Python, and those are equally irrelevant to
people who don't need to update (for instance, 3.9.0b5 is irrelevant
unless you're tracking the betas, and 3.7.8 doesn't make a lot of
difference unless you need the very latest 3.7 and don't get it from a
package manager). Is that a problem? I don't think so. These lists get
a lot of traffic and the normal way to distinguish them is by their
subject lines, and every one of these EuroPython threads has had that
word in the subject.

ChrisA