Re: [Fwd: Problems contacting the debian people .... (was: new configuration to avoid spam at the lists)]
Hi,
I've been a little busy in the last couple of weeks, and haven't had
time to reply to this particular set of emails as it's more complicated
than most requests.
I will usually answer the easier requests first to get them out of the
way.
On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 11:07:52PM +0200, MarC wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Can anybody help me?
>
> In order to suggest a "better" (IMO) configuration for the mailing lists
> to avoid spam, I have sent several mails during my life to
> listarchives@debian.org according to this subject and I never got any
> answer.
You have received some answers. At this point listarchives@debian.org
just points to listmaster@lists.debian.org
> However, some weeks ago, I was able to contact
> listmaster@lists.debian.org and Pascal Hakim answered me (thank you!).
> See below the content of such mail...
>
> Then, I reported to the users of the debian-catalan-user list his answer
> and I did a poll to know their opinion about it which can be checked at
> the archives of the list
> (http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-catalan/2005/debian-user-catalan-200505/threads.html).
> But since I reported back the results (16-5-2005) nobody has answered me
> again...
There are a few issues at play here.
Firstly, I do not believe that this would actually help a huge amount.
There are currently a few different other places where spammers can get
those addresses. For example, most lists are currently replicated to NNTP services,
where addresses are not obfuscated. I'm also convinced that there are
spammer feeder bots subscribed to the lists. While I have no conclusive
proof of this, both Anand and myself have seen strange behaviour that
can probably only be explained by that. There's basically nothing that
can be done about either of those.
Secondly, there's a massive technical problem. A lot of things posted on
lists are of a technical nature, and include at signs. Whether this is
because they're stack traces, arch archive names, or perl arrays doesn't
matter a great deal, you don't want those to be damaged.
Finally, I'm not really willing to have this enabled for just one list.
It's liable to cause even more problems in terms of administration.
> >Finally we have realised that some spammers write directly to the list
> >without being stopped by any moderator. I think we should also improve
> >this. Do you think it's possible? See the "english posts" of
> >http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-catalan/2005/debian-user-catalan-200505/threads.html
> >
I'm also not willing to add moderators to lists. Having moderators causes more
problems than not having any.
Cheers,
Pasc
(with his listmaster hat on)
--
Pascal Hakim 0403 411 672
Do Not Bend
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