Re: Advertising on Planet Debian
On Tue, 3 May 2005, Pascal Hakim wrote:
> On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 12:04:51PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > What is commonly called "Debian mailing list advertising policy" is
> > currently a bad joke. IMHO, we should either:
> >
> > a) Be serious and remove such joke from lists.debian.org web pages.
>
> Just because no one is enforcing it at the moment, doesn't mean that it
> will never be enforced.
FYI: The "Debian mailing list advertising policy" started when Bruce Perens,
acting as listmaster, setup smartlist in lists.debian.org so that messages
from people without posting privileges triggered a message asking people
to say "Yes, I agree with the mailing list advertising policy". Until
then, there was no posting privileges for that email address. That's why
such policy worked in the past.
The very first day such C/R system was removed from lists.debian.org, lists
were open to spam again and the "advertising policy" became a total joke.
I don't want to imply that such C/R system would be appropriate today,
just that we were in fact enforcing this policy in the past by
technical means, and we had no spam at all.
> If you wish to start chasing people to collect
> payment, then feel free to start doing it.
Sure. The easy thing is to have a wonderful anti-spam "policy" which does
not work and ask others to start chasing people to collect payment.
That is not the way we were enforcing this policy in the past. The
policy was there *because* we had a way to enforce it. If we do not
have any way to enforce it anymore, we should abandon such policy.
> > b) Be serious and prevent spam from reaching our lists *much* more
> > effectively. What we are doing to fight spam in the lists is
> > clearly not enough.
>
> What we are doing is mostly what the listmasters believe is appropriate.
Unfortunately, what you, listmasters, believe is "appropriate" might
not be the same as users of the lists consider appropriate. Have you
ever asked people in the lists how much spam do they want to receive?
> I'm at the point, where I believe that having much stricter spam
> checking results in too many false positives, or causes our users more
> trouble than its worth.
>
> If there was a perfect solution to spam, we'd all be using it already.
There isn't any Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem [*], but that's
not an excuse to not improve filtering at lists.debian.org, where it can
be improved. For example:
* Razor does not work properly yet (still receive messages in razor from l.d.o)
* Pyzor does not work properly yet (still receive messages in pyzor from l.d.o)
* Are you already using greylisting?
* Are you already using the DCC?
[*] http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html
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