Moderate this list?

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 5 Nov 2003, Damian Donnelly wrote:

>I think moderating this list, as suggested, is a good idea. The
>amount of abuse (personal opinion and nit-picking) of this
>mailing list today has almost convinced me to unsuscribe.
>
>Pull yourselves together.

I agree with your second sentence completely.  It's tiring to
read the same old repeated tirades day in and day out, especially
on a list like fedora-devel which is supposed to be strictly
about development.  I know many people have commented both
internally at Red Hat and externally along the general idea of
"whoa, there's so much crap coming in it's hard to sift the 
useful interesting stuff and on topic stuff from all the rants 
and raves and garbage" and similar.  I agree, I can't keep up 
with it all, so I sift looking for "XFree86" in people's 
subjects, skip over subjects that are obvious neverending 
flamewars and pointless ranting, and try to find useful mails to 
reply to.

It's such a pileup of mostly total garbage though, so as to make 
the signal level very low compared to the noise.  I might move 
the list out of my pine search path into my archive path, just to 
avoid the volume of what is mostly pointless garbage and 
bitching.  ;o)

The other alternatives at least for me are to:

1) Set a procmail filter to delete anything without XFree86 or 
   other special keywords in the subject

2) Unsubscribe


Moderation would be nice in theory, but there's 2 problems with 
that:

1) People would scream bloody murder 10 times more and claim Red 
Hat is an evil closed blah blah for having a moderated list and 
their freedom of speech is being withheld and censored, blah blah 
blah.  So that would never ever work out, if anything it would 
generate 2 times as much useless off topic junkmail.

and

2) Someone would have to moderate each post.  That would be more 
or less a full time job, and if the purpose of it was to kill off 
topic and/or totally useless threads, most of the list traffic 
would almost completely vanish IMHO, making the list pretty 
quiet.  ;o)


So, I think people want the lists open, thats fine, but then 
people get what they get, which at least currently is cacophony 
on fedora-devel-list, fedora-test-list, and fedora-list all 3 
lists of which are almost indistinguishable from one another 
contentwise.  I wonder if they'd make good bayesian filter data 
for spamassassin though.  ;o)

Anyway, that's my $0.03 CDN.  ;oP


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat