Patrick R. McManus wrote:
[Joe Touch: Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 11:21:28AM -0800]
Lists for open discussion should require such hoops for participation,
esp. when there are plenty of reasonable, sufficiently correlated
identifiers than "not a list member" to identify spam.
...
I think you're defining the calculus of list policy wholly in terms of
the poster and not at all in terms of the large numbers of readers.
I just have a different optimization
The e2e-interest blacklist is new. It appears to be a reaction to the
embarrassing amount of spam that that list has redistributed over the
last couple of years
It's a little over a year since we converted from full-open to
spam-limited. The transition was motivated largely by poorly configured
automated virus detection software, which implosion-spammed the list too
frequently. Since this was the result of user (mis)configuration, I'm
not as willing as you to make configuration management a
user-participation event.
Clearly, the brand new system is not a useful datapoint yet,
(if you had checked our website, you would know it wasn't brand new.)
but the totally unregulated nature of the list whose
results dictated the need for the new policy is a strong indictment
against pure open lists in the current climate.
There I at least agree- pure open (no spam filter, no user filter) was
insufficient.
I believe that spam should be filtered out because of WHAT it is, not
because of WHO it comes from.
At some point a legitimate submission will be snagged as a false
positive by that system.
My original post had details on this - like the IETF suggestion, our
list puts spam in a folder for moderator confirmation. False positives
are corrected there.
---
I do believe that non-subscribers have just as much reason and
permission to post to these (mine and the IETF) lists. I support a
system that allows spam if the user subscribes (an issue you have not
yet addressed).
The main issue here is about the rule for the filter. We all want less
spam. The difference is:
- to me, spam is defined by content
- to you, spam is defined by user
and assumes a correlation between user and content
Joe