Re: Proposed change for subscriptions...

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 15:09, Steve Lamb wrote:
You've been around long enough to know how things work. You know the
project has a policy of open, non-moderated mailing lists.

Yup. And I've made it well known I think it is a pretty dumb policy
for the reasons stated.

You also know
that to change that policy you need to convince either the
lists-masters or the project as a whole. Abusing the lists-masters on
-user won't help.

Yes, it does. As I told Anand a person who approaches them in
private has their voice squelched in private. A person who brings it out
in public and gets support from other people in public can start a
snow-ball effect of even greater public support.

It's real easy to ignore a single voice in private. It's a lot
harder to ignore many voices in a public forum.

Certainly feel free to have the discussion in public, but keep it calm and
rational.

Personal abuse of the listmasters won't help. Ever. If you can't discuss
things in a calm and reasoned tone, then you will only alienate people,
including potential supporters.

Seriously, how much spam are you getting from debian-user?

On a good day, about as equal to what makes it through my filters to
my inbox. On a bad day d-u is the major contributor to the spam that
makes it through my filters.

Now is this
(i) spam as in unsolicited commercial/bulk email,
(ii) noise as in clueless user looking for eg. windows help,
(iii) noise as in clueless linux user "how do I ...",
(iv) noise as in "that was asked and answered 3 times last week",
(v) noise as in not this argument again?

Personally I find the noise to be a big problem. But I don't believe that
requiring subscription before posting will solve it. (I concede that it
will help,) but I expect it would discourage the roughly the same
proportion of (ii), (iii) and (iv). Each discouraged (iii) and (iv) is a
potentially a lost user.

I don't believe subscription will help with (v) (short of unsubscribing the
offenders of course).

Personally I like the fact that people can post from accounts which
aren't subscribed. It's very convenient to be able to add a cc to
another list to get an opinion on a issue from a specialised list. It
makes it much easier to cope with debians 141 active lists[0].

Granted. So the question then becomes can there be a mechanism
provided that would allow such posts without open lists? For example
allow linked posting rights based on subscription to *a* mailing list
hosted at lists.debian.org if not the specific list being posted to?

That doesn't help with say, a GNU Classpath developer dealing with a bug
which looks like its debian specific, and wanting to discuss it on
debian-java.

If you really want to see the current policy changed, then present a
constructive, rational argument to the lists-masters and/or -project. eg.
Gather statistics about how much spam gets through per day/week/month.
Start a new thread titled eg. [VOTE] Should debian-user require
subscription before posting.

If you can gather enough (ie overwhelming) support, take the discussion to
say -project, and try to convince the project as a whole. Personally I
don't like your chances. -devel seems committed to open mailing lists.

Andrew


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