From: Paul Vixie <vixie(_at_)vix(_dot_)com>
... therefore it's possible that your rant [about ASRG moderation]
That raises an issue that I think the IETF and IRTF and certainly the
ASRG moderator should consider. All contributions that are rejected
by any moderators (including spam filters) of any IRTF or IETF mailing
lists must be archived and should be published on web pages somewhere.
Archiving is obviously critical for the defense of the moderators
against charges of unfairness, self-dealing, and so forth. Publishing
the rejected contributions would go a long way toward defusing or even
refuting such charges with minimal embarrassment to those making them
and disruption of valuable IETF and IRTF activities. There might be
some extreme contributions perhaps involving child pornography or
libel that could not be published, but those are surely rare and could
be dealt with individually.
I hope that all of the rejected contributions to the ASRG mailing list
have been archived. Based on "courtesy" copies of messages that have
been sent to me, I suspect that publishing the messages rejected for
the ASRG list would be quite helpful. Publishing them would do no
harm to the work of the mailing list.
The cycles of noise on the main IETF list about some other mailing
lists would be helped by this policy. Besides squelching a lot of
the noise by making the moderation obviously justified, it might also
satisfy those who really want their words published.
An easy way to implement such a policy is to use the usual mailing
list software to create parallel "lists" which to not allow subscriptions
or contributions except from the moderator of the main list but that
has an open archive. The moderator could send copies of any rejected
documents and any relevant coorespondence to the parallel "list."
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com