advocacy/89731: TOO MANY SPAMs on jp.freebsd.org's mailing list

[Remko Lodder]

On Wed, November 30, 2005 15:20, Takeo Hashimoto wrote:
>
> I don't think so, they do search first on the web before posting mail.
> and that is my 1st point.
>  - newbie can not find any kind of know-how from ML archive site.
> because the archive has been filled with spam.

You are colliding with yourself here i think. People do not search the
archives first and then ask questions, as someone who helped out on
questions@ a year ago, i can tell you that. Also -if- people search
on the archives and they give good keywords they will find the proper
information without the spam.

>
> But I agree "open" and "restrict_post" should be beneficiate for each
> list.
>
>>                                                     The other problem
>> is that
>>some ML, like questions@, get a large number of e-mails a day.  I'm
>> not sure
>>it's fair to require a user to wade through a hundred or more
>> non-spams just
>>so they can ask a question.
>
> If user posts some questions to the list,
> then he might get some answer, and also much hard spam?
> unfortunately it is true at jp.FreeBSD lists.
> I think the policy "restrict_post" will save him (and also us).
>
> but you don't think so. mmm...

I think that it will not work; restrict post requires manual
intervention and that will cost a lot of overhead; many posts will be
blocked and in the end no one will be happy. The one thing that can be
done on the jp.freebsd.org side is filtering more agressively like the
freebsd.org mx records do. Also these days end users should have
enabled spam filters, mostly that is an option through the ISP they
use, and imo people cannot live without some kind of filtering anymore,
and that will only get worse (and worse; and worse).

>
>>> > Adding restrict_post actually is a lot of work on the admins since
>>> > someone has to handle all the bounced e-mails.
>>>
>>> I think we can simply ignore them (>/dev/null).
>>>
>>> If you have better idea to stop deliver spam,
>>> please let me know.
>>
>>Most of the FreeBSD developers when we have had discussions on spam
>> recently
>
> "discussions" sounds good.
>
> I think we are same on this point:
>   "how to make it easy for new people to get started with FreeBSD?"
>

We should provide proper help to the people that have questions and do
the thing we can do (implement some level of filtering at our side by
using blacklists or something).

> but the conclusion is different.  You say "open the door (with
> gatekeeper)"
> I say "close the door until you examine the newcomer is a human".

I'd say; open a can of people that can help you manage this and you are
welcome to put this into production ;-)

>
> I think that it is policy problem, so jp admins need to have public
> hearing.
> Will this PR cause their action? I hope.

I do not think this will cause postmaster at jp.freebsd.org to start doing
something with it. This mailinglist, nor any of the others are for that
specific reason. you should contact them immediatly...

>
>>have concluded that the spam problem is so large and extent, that the
>> only
>>real solution is for the receiver to block spam.
>
> well, we have to write easy-setup-guide of spam-filter
> for beginners, and have to shout to them
> "Wait! set up your filter before you post!"

Right, and that people should not drive too hard since they will
get traffic fines and that they should not steal, kill and such..
impossible :-)

> #----------------------------------------------------------#
> # Takeo Hashimoto.                             sempre ff.  #
> #----------------------------------------------------------#
>

-- 
Kind regards,

   Remko Lodder  ** remko at elvandar.org
        FreeBSD  ** remko at FreeBSD.org