Jim,
Thanks for your comments:
Your suggestion to automate the detection of "persistent and excessive"
could work for people and would help "throttle down" those discussions
that need it from time to time, but it would not protect an elist from
spam.
Neither does non-subscriber moderation. List spammers can subscribe
first, from throw-away 3rd party accounts for example.
The only way to completely block spam is prior restraint, which causes:
- subjective judgements on borderline cases
- need for moderator(s) to be on line often
- delays in posting for everyone
- other forums to become more useful
None of those disadvantages are acceptable, as reflected in the official
IETF Working Group guidelines.
People who are not used to spam and incapable of ignoring it probably
do not have the kind of experience with the internet which would help
the IETF serve its mission and advance the state of the art, anyway.
Having said that, if there is going to be a rule-based system in place
to detect "persistent and excessive" posts to a list and spool such
messages depending upon parameters such as subscriber/nonsubscriber
source address, here are some more suggestions for paramters:
- Redundancy. Messages substantially similar to recent messages (based
on similarities seen in the virus warning floods of the past few months
on the ietf list) might be held for a moderator to examine at his or
her convienience.
- HTML email. I am not the only one who would like to see HTML
messages replaced with a message saying "This message contained
only HTML; to view it, please visit http://www.ietf.org/....";
- Size. Messages over several dozen kilobytes could be truncated and
similar archive pointer URLs placed at the beginning and end of the
list-sent message with a similar explanatory blurb.
However, I would advise not including rules based on substrings (e.g.,
"make money fa$t" etc.) because that is an endless game of cat-and-mouse.
Cheers,
James