On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 5:50 PM, John Lewis <johnflewis93(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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!).
I've been involved in managing a few low-traffic mailing lists
(including @wikimedia) where:
* The advertisement of the list states "you must be subscribed".
* Generally the moderation queue is full of spam and just piles up.
* The moderators will only clear stuff out in exceptional cases. E.g.
when they themselves CC'd the list on some other list, and had
follow-up replies.
So piling up moderation queues can be a symptom of a list that's run
as a soft "subscribers only" list.
It doesn't mean that the list is inactive, the only problem is that
the queue just sits there getting bigger, but such lists would be fine
with it being purged after some period.
Now admittedly the list I moderate @wikimedia for the Icelandic
Wikipedia (that caused me to notice this thread) is very inactive now,
but I just thought I'd point out that it isn't always the case that
just because you have a list with a piling up moderation queue that
the list is mismanaged. It may just be run by a community where the
list is advertised as subscriber-only, but the moderators would rather
not flatout reject non-subscriber messages via a mail policy (e.g. for
the CC-ing other lists case, or if a community member asks where their
mail went).
On Saturday, 29 August 2015, R. Acconish
<racconish(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for the reply.
Can someone please confirm the best is to do nothing, i.e. to just wait
for the spam to be deleted on the server?
Cheers,
Racconish
2015-08-28 7:22 GMT+02:00 Asaf Bartov <abartov(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
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 <racconish(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
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 <dougwellerarbcom(a)gmail.com>om>:
>
> 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:
>>
>> Hello list admins,
>>
>> we have found that globally we had over half a million
>> mails in mailman lists that were not moderated.
>>
>> So that means they got held in the moderation queues but were not
>> accepted or discarded.
>>
>> We have started deleting the oldest ones first (over 1 year old) then
>> moved to (older than 6 months).
>>
>> We are planning to setup an automated cron job to do this
>> automatically in the background.
>>
>> Currently the plan is to delete all messages that are held and older
>> than 90 days.
>>
>> Please let us know if any concerns and moderate a bit more if this
>> affects your list.
>>
>> Thank you and best regards,
>>
>> Daniel
>> --
>> Daniel Zahn <dzahn(a)wikimedia.org>
>> Operations Engineer
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Listadmins mailing list
>> Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Listadmins mailing list
> Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins
>
_______________________________________________
Listadmins mailing list
Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins
--
Asaf Bartov
Wikimedia Foundation
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
--
John Lewis
_______________________________________________
Listadmins mailing list
Listadmins(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins