To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman(_at_)imc(_dot_)org>
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.
FWIW, some of the IETF WG mailing lists that IMC runs get >10 spams a
day, and often get the virus/trojans that are >120K each. This is not
an insignificant amount of junk to wade through when looking for
proof of moderator badness/goodness.
I disagree in general, but perhaps that's because I look at several
100 spam every day.
Not logging messages > 30 Kbytes (or 10K or even 10K) would be fine
Even better would be logging but truncating.
And there's also the problem of robots that harvest everything,
regardless of your robots.txt file. If we had a system like you
describe, it would be believable that the archives would get a fair
number of hits from people searching for pr0n but finding our archive
of spam instead.
You say that as if it's a bad thing. I really don't see the problem.
I think that having all bounces (for whatever reason) archived is
fine; I think having it as "web pages somewhere" is overkill. Access
to one of the big text archives can be a trivial password given to
anyone who wants it for research purposes.
"Openness" and "transparency" are good things in general but best and
most effective when you don't notice them. Keeping things secret not
only feeds the paranoia of kooks, but does no good and it makes it
hard to check a suspicion or a charge without making a federal case.
The proximate example is a perfect case. It is impossible to check
whether the other person's charge that the ASRG moderator is rejecting
contributions because of some sort of self-dealing without the IETF
equivalent of going to court to get a subpoena. That's not any sort
of "openness and transparency."
The suggestion of having two lists, one filtered and a second named
whatever-noise, both with open archives, sounds fine to me, but wouldn't
help the ASRG case. I think that the ASRG case would be instantly
resolved if the moderator would publish all of the rejected messages
and related corresponce without any additional commentary...not that
I think there's any case there, but passers-by might not have seen the
first several weeks of traffic in the ASRG mailing list not to mention
those "courtesy" copies I mentioned.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com