Re: GNOME list admin/moderation seperation

[Ross Golder <ross golder org>]

On พฤ., 2004-12-16 at 12:06 +0700, Ross Golder wrote:
> I think we could do with some kind of 'moderator team' - a handful of
> people with no real technical skills, but a willingness to contribute a
> few minutes a day to keeping *all* the GNOME list moderator queues in
> check. They would just need to subscribe to 'gnome-listmoderator', and
> deal with all the moderator requests as they see fit. The owner for all
> of the lists would remain unchanged, but 'gnome-listmoderator' would be
> listed as the moderator address for all the lists.
> 

OK, I'll have to be the initial moderator team for now. I tried to set
up 'gnome-listmoderator' as a mailman list, but had a few issues, so I
just set up a plain 'moderator: ross golder org' postfix alias for now.
I don't think mailman is really designed to have moderator teams - yet!
Probably better to keep it simple.

I figure we just need a couple more volunteers, preferably in different
timezones. We modify the crontab so that the daily reminders are sent
out early each morning (say 8am) for each timezone that has a volunteer.
Each morning, the volunteer would process the most recent batch of
reminders (unless they've missed their slot for some reason), and then
delete them all. This should keep the moderator queues trimmed, and with
a roughly-less-than 24hr response time for genuine e-mails. Obviously,
the more moderators we have, the lower the response time, and the less
time each moderator will have to spend each morning.

With our current anti-spam measures, it's actually not too arduous a
task, unless you it gets neglected and builds up. You just need to click
on the link in a few reminder e-mails, type the moderator password into
each browser window, scan down each of the list for mails that look
genuine, mark them as 'Accept' and click the 'Discard the reset' tickbox
and submit. No rocket science required. Judging from experience, I guess
that it would take one moderator less than 20 mins per day to cover all
our lists, or a team of 6 moderators less than 5 mins per person per
day. There are also ways that (patching) mailman could make it even
easier, but I'll go into that another time.

If you, or anyone you know, is able to spare a few minutes a day to help
out the GNOME list moderator team (and to help save me a few minutes a
day), please pretty please drop me an e-mail.

> This takes the pressure off list owners to moderate their list (they're
> usually also the project maintainer/active developer, so are often
> distracted with other responsibilities anyway). Also, it will take the
> noise away from 'gnome-listadmin'.
> 

Unless anyone has any objections, I'm going to suggest that list owners
remove any references to 'gnome-listadmin' from their list (unless of
course, it is the main address), add 'moderator gnome org' as their
moderator's address, and drop me an e-mail so I can create a list of
'moderated' lists (I'll then go and set a common moderator password on
them).

> Any particular feelings or thoughts about this idea? Should I re-propose
> this in an e-mail to *-list-owner gnome org?
> 

I'm about to send that e-mail...

--
Ross