we (wikimedia-de-by) have the problem that since ~1 year the moderation front-end doesn't work anymore…

This is scary, as it suggests that there must be some genuine emails not getting through. If there are particular lists where the numbers are much higher than others than perhaps we should be told. Doug Weller On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:33 PM, Daniel Zahn <dzahn(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: _______________________________________________ Listadmins mailing list Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins

Yes: Several lists have been receiving mass subscription requests, from hyphenated random e-mail addresses. A. On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 11:13 AM, R. Acconish &lt;racconish(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org> Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! https://donate.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Listadmins mailing list Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins

The best thing to do is to manage moderation queues, deleting spam and approving emails as they come. Leaving spam does nothing but gives false statistics for us to read into. As we will eventually be looking at lists and moderation queues and if lists repeatedly have large queues, we will either assume their inactive, spam targets or need new moderators. Leaving emails in moderation is extremely bad practise as it increases work to find legitimate emails, decreases the chance that they will be sent to the list in an appropriate time and add delay to server side operations as the directories increase in size. In my opinion, moderators who leave emails in the queue because it's spam, aren't doing a just or a service to anyone and I would encourage them to either give up their responsibilities or have list admins be more active over the matter and remove them. It's the same as on wikis, if you see spam or vandalism - do you leave it or do you remove it? Lists are no different except you have to be trusted to have the ability to prevent and remove them. Also spam filters do learn from your actions! If you discard mail from a domain or emails of a similar pattern, the filter will then learn from it and rank emails higher. While if we delete it server side, the filters are no trained and it means more spam will be allowed to the moderators (though it depends if filters exist to prevent high scoring spam are implemented in the right place!). John Lewis On Saturday, 29 August 2015, R. Acconish &lt;racconish(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- John Lewis _______________________________________________ Listadmins mailing list Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins

The best thing to do is to manage moderation queues, deleting spam and approving emails as they come. Leaving spam does nothing but gives false statistics for us to read into. As we will eventually be looking at lists and moderation queues and if lists repeatedly have large queues, we will either assume their inactive, spam targets or need new moderators. Leaving emails in moderation is extremely bad practise as it increases work to find legitimate emails, decreases the chance that they will be sent to the list in an appropriate time and add delay to server side operations as the directories increase in size. In my opinion, moderators who leave emails in the queue because it's spam, aren't doing a just or a service to anyone and I would encourage them to either give up their responsibilities or have list admins be more active over the matter and remove them. It's the same as on wikis, if you see spam or vandalism - do you leave it or do you remove it? Lists are no different except you have to be trusted to have the ability to prevent and remove them. Also spam filters do learn from your actions! If you discard mail from a domain or emails of a similar pattern, the filter will then learn from it and rank emails higher. While if we delete it server side, the filters are no trained and it means more spam will be allowed to the moderators (though it depends if filters exist to prevent high scoring spam are implemented in the right place!).

On Saturday, 29 August 2015, R. Acconish &lt;racconish(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- John Lewis _______________________________________________ Listadmins mailing list Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins

Racconish, we had the same problem a year or so back on enwiki's arbcom-l. We resolved it by turning off subscription requests (the thinking was that a listadmin would always subscribe the new members anyway). Would recommend you do the same. On 27 August 2015 at 19:13, R. Acconish &lt;racconish(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: much wrote: -- Anthony _______________________________________________ Listadmins mailing list Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins

Don't know if this is related but car-fr-l has been receiving an abnormal amount of subscription requests for the last 3 days. Cheers, Racconish 2015-08-25 17:58 GMT+02:00 Doug Weller &lt;dougwellerarbcom(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: _______________________________________________ Listadmins mailing list Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins

Anthony, Can you please explain how to turn off subscription requests ?

On 29 August 2015 at 17:20, R. Acconish &lt;racconish(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Hi Racconish – as Savh says, within the admin interface: Privacy options > Subscription rules > "What steps are required for subscription?" and change to "Confirm and approve." Turning off the advertised status of the list also helps: it is a private list so it probably doesn't need to be advertised, in any case. Hope this helps, Anthony _______________________________________________ Listadmins mailing list Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins

This may be an excellent corpus to analyse the kind of spam received by WMF lists and prepare some global rules. Generally mailman thas a great job filtering just by ensuring mails come from suscriptors, and I bet 98% of what's waiting is unwanted. Some ham will have been triggered by the "body too big" rule, and there's the occasional subscriptor that replies with the wrong account, but it's mostly content we are really not interested in. Some address found to have been spamming many of our lists, and not being subscribed to any (to rule out a cross-posting wikimedia) should be added to a global discard/reject list. In fact it is a pity that we don't keep a global remitent blacklist and several list admins need to review their crap, each one on its queue. We could simply have a milter that adds a "X-WM-sender-type: spammer" header (an opposite X-WM-sender-type: contributor could be used, too), and opting out would be as simple as removing the filter that discarded it by default. Yes, I consider such configurated would have to be provided by default. In fact, there's a SpamAssassin scoring emails that we could take better advantage of, but I'm not that in any has it configured. Again, it'd be interested to gather stats about the spaminess score given to such presumedly-spam corpus. In general, we are fighting list spam standalone, with very little coordination. Plus, I'm sure we can better use our tools. For instance just, automatically holding emails from: ^info@ ^.*-owner@ (I should probably have added noreply, too) did wonders for improving the cleanliness of certain list accepting non-members posts. Sidenote to list owners: Please delete any subscriptions of my email to this list using plus aliases. They work very well for organising what comes from mailman (mailman-owner addressed mail, retentions, bots crawling the address…) but interact badly with this list as I was multiple subscripted, since -when combined with gmail "feature" of delivering just a single email- emails from this list may randomly arrive on any of several list administrative folders. For instance, Daniel original email was filled as related to mediawiki-l. And I spent some time looking where Patrick email had gone before discovering that it wasn't in the archives :P _______________________________________________ Listadmins mailing list Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins

Functionaries and the main en.WIki arbitration list are getting a lot of spam right now, with quite a few common domains. I'm not sure why I couple of related lists I moderate only get bounces. Doug