On 07/09/2007, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/09/2007, Armed Blowfish diodontida.armata@googlemail.com wrote:
- If a patch were to be written for Mailman-side killfiles, for individual users, would the patch be used?
I don't know what a "killfile" is.
A killfile dates back to the nearly unmoderated USENET. Sure, there was the USENET death penalty, but that wasn't used very often. A killfile basically allows individual users to specify the addresses of those they do not wish to received messages from. Basically, what Marc and Peter have been recommending, but instead of having to skim, messages from people you don't like need never appear before you. You could also match by other criteria, e.g. subject, other header info.
Any halfway decent email client should have some sort of killfile implementation. In Google Mail, for example, this functionality is provided via filters. However, since some people might have bad email clients, this could theoretically be done on Mailman's side as well, where a user could log in to Mailman and ask Mailman to not send him or her email matching certain criteria. Note that Mailman could only control email sent via the list itself - only a client-side killfile could filter mail sent directly to an individual. Still, moderation can't do any more than that anyway.
A killfile type system of message control would probably work better if public archival were turned off, as public archival may make users feel pressured to respond to messages they would otherwise ignore.
- If a patch were to be written for a user preference for a moderated user to be able to decide if s/he wants to appear on a public list of moderated users, would the patch be used? (The default could be set to 'no'.)
I suppose, if the Wikimedia developers wanted to put something like that on, and people seemed to want it. Keep in mind there are a lot of things we'd like a patch for, and the Wikimedia developers haven't done anything about them up until now. Their interest in modding MailMan always seems pretty much nil, unfortunately.
Mailman was not written by Wikimedia developers, but by Mailman developers - the Wikimedia developers need not be involved. Besides, I am offering to try to write the code, if you are interested in having it, which would make me the developer. (Alternatively, I guess I could just submit a feature request to the Mailman project, but then there would be no guarantee that anyone would try it, or that they would try it any time soon. Still, it's a back up plan if I can't figure out how the Mailman source tree works.)
(Note that it's Mailman, not MailMan.)
However, any such patch would most likely be added to the development version of Mailman, meaning the Wikimedia server administrators would have to upgrade. If you don't think they could be talked into that, and that you would use it, then I am most likely not willing to spend my time on this.
- Mailman already has the ability to not archive publicly. Would not archiving publicly reduce tension on the list? Should this option be changed?
There's always that option, but the mailing list is already mirrored on other sites like Gmane too, and there's theoretically nothing stopping someone subscribing to the list and setting up their own public archive.
Gmane would theoretically stop mirroring if you stopped archiving, no? Of course, there is no way to ensure security, but you do at least have control over the official archive.
- Would it be better to let individual users decide whether or not they want their messages archived? If a patch were written to grant this capability, would it be used?
People tend to quote other posters' posts fully, so I don't know that that would be all that successful. It would have to be well-written to strip all that sort of stuff out.
Hence not publicly archiving anything would probably be better. Still, consider partial public archiving a third possibility.
- Are there any other possible patches that might be used?
There is a way, buried deep within the admin interface, to auto-discard messages matching a specific Regexp. I know nothing about regexps, but frequently wish I did, because it would help us cut down on a lot of the V14GR4-style spam. Which almost never reaches the mailing list but outnumbers genuine messages from real people in the moderation queue by a factor of about 20 or 25 to one.
~Mark Ryan
Specifically in Configuration Categories > Privacy options > Spam filters.
Could you be specific? For example, would you be able to send me a large sample of the sort of spam you want auto-discarded (not to this address) - particularly the headers, I don't think Mailmain looks at the message content itself - along with you present Spam filtering policy (privately)?
You might have better luck running running the mail through SpamAssassin *before* it hits Mailman. You would have to talk to the Wikimedia server administrators about setting that up. It's far better than anything one could do with the Mailman regular expression interface.