Re: GNOME list admin/moderation seperation

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc linuxweasel com>]

I have no idea if I have contorted enough to make Thunderbird send this 
in plain text.  Hopefully so, as there is no content that begs for HTML.

Ross Golder wrote:

> [snip]
>
> 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.
>  
This certainly sounds good, though I'm not sure I see it actually 
happening.  The time savings I see from having more moderators is not so 
much from having fewer individual mails to review, as that takes very 
little time, but from having fewer lists that need to have the queue 
cleared every X hours.  If you can find folks who will sign up, and 
check in on their lists at a specific time each day, this might actually 
work out.  As for me, I've been doing it "when I have time," which is 
never at the same time two times in a row, let alone two days in a row. 

> 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.
>  

I've found that, on my fairly decent computer, it takes me > 30 minutes 
to get to all of the moderator reqests, even if there are only a dozen 
or so per list.  Most of my time is really spent waiting for browser 
windows to spawn, and for the pages to actually load after I enter the 
mailman password.  I've found that the upper limit of my tolerances is 
about 5-6 lists at a time.  More than that becomes tedious.  If I only 
have 2 or 3 lists to do, I usually don't bother, as it will end up being 
faster for me to wait until there are 5 lists, so that the 'overhead' 
gets spread out a bit more.

> 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.
I can still do "spot checks," but likely am not organized enough to 
commit to doing things at a specific time every day.  Later,
   Greg