Re: Revitalizing the list services

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2006, Guilherme de S. Pastore wrote:

> Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 20:06:36 -0300
> From: Guilherme de S. Pastore <gpastore gnome org>
> To: listowners gnome org
> Subject: Revitalizing the list services
>
> Dear GNOME list owners,
>
> as you must have noticed by now, the long-unused listowners gnome org
> mailing list has been reactivated in the last 24 hours. Firstly because
> it is important and useful to have ways to easily contact you at any
> moment, but most specially due to some changes which are about to happen
> and are going to require some communication.
>
> The current situation basically indicates that list matters have been
> somewhat neglected. There are highly-used lists which have not been
> taken care of for years, some of which have already popped up and been
> given to our Moderator Team. On the other hand, there are others which
> are no longer used, should have been archived and still have not;
> consequently, they are at the moment only collecting enormous amounts of
> spam in their queues of held messages, which is likely never going to be
> dealt with.

Is there no way to better automate this process?

It is great that we have enough bodies to throw at the problem but I've
always disliked how projects like Wikipedia use brute force to tidy up the
mess when a smarter system is needed to stop or at least reduce the
problems earlier.

For example I think discussions of Viagra and other subjects are plainly
offtopic for most Gnome lists and it seems fair enough to take a more
aggrevise approach when filtering out spam from the lists.

> What will be taking place during this month and probably the next one is
> a process to help us identify inactive and overly busy list owners, so
> that new owners can be appointed to their lists and/or the moderation
> tasks can be handed to the Moderator Team.

I think I might be interested in helping the Moderator Team occasionally.
Is there a wiki page somewhere with more information?

> This is simply a status update so that you have an idea about what will
> be happening next, and that you are aware you shall hear from me again
> soon. If doubts arise, or if you have any suggestions, feel free to mail
> me back.

Thanks for putting the work in and making things happen.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan.