<OT> <OT> Re: list moderator losing perspective?

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2007, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
>I don't think doing away with either General or <OT> would be beneficial.
>Everyone uses these lists in different ways.  Often, I don't have time to keep 
>up on every post, so they pile up, and I pile through them quickly.
>
>I let General@ traffic go unfiltered because it is relatively low-traffic and 
>I have no need to save the postings for review.  If I get too many, I just 
>delete them and move on with life.
>
>Still, <OT> on linux-users is still good.  Since as Mike noted, we *always* go 
>offtopic a bit, <OT> is still appropriate.  And I don't want most of that 
>traffic hitting General :)

IHMO the OT threads are part and parcel of this list, perhaps going back to
the Chili Pepper cook offs and continuing through trip pictures and Ric's
Rants(tm).

>But Lonnie and other list moderators have a difficult time keeping track of 
>stuff.  Having too many Windows topics on a Linux list would be bad... 
>although perhaps we're seeing some frustration on all sides, which is why 
>this thread started.  

I host several fairly high-volume tehnical mailing lists, at least one of
which gets into fairly lengthy off-topic threads (and, in the past, a few
virulent flame wars which have largely subsided).  These lists run under
Mailman on Linux (so this isn't entirely off-topic), and I've never found
it necessary to run them as moderated lists using the Mailman defaults
restricting posts to list members.  I, or delegated assistants, have to
approve a few messages every day, usually where somebody on the list is
posting from an address other than the one to which they've subscribed.  I
have Mailman set up to use Spamassassin to score incoming messages, sending
those with a score above a certain threshhold to the moderators and nuking
those with scores above another threshhold.

Using this policy, the number of spam messages that get through to the
lists is very low, averaging fewer than one a month.

So far I have never dropped anybody from any of these lists because of
messages they've posted (although I've been sorely tempted on occassion).
The only people that get unsubscribed involuntarily are those who's
messages bounce or who press the SPAM button on AOL resulting in SCOMP
notices from AOL.

Speaking of SCOMP, I got an amusing notification from AOL on one this
morning in which an AOL user marked a message as spam -- which was blowback
from spam sent to an invalid address on our network with a forged AOL From:
address.

Bill
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