Follow up on the spam problem

Got an email from Ryan McDougall about my previous d-d-l spam
problem
post. He points out what he wrote at a page on
live.gnome.org
, which definitely have good ideas and which would
definitely help. While we have tried similar stuff before (I’m really
glad Mark worked so hard at this last year and was disappointed that
others such as Alan flamed him for it); renewing the push to do this
would definitely be good. I think we should do it. But it really
isn’t everything I want either. There are many emails that would be
considered on-topic on d-d-l but which would just be considered spam
to many who would otherwise want to be subscribed to d-d-l. Some
examples:

  • freeze break requests are rarely relevant to more than a couple
    people outside a given module; those who want to follow those could
    subscribe to d-d-l or read the r-t archives instead of the “filtered
    d-d-l” list I had in mind
  • threads about work on a single module don’t appear to be
    considered offtopic in many cases (and it’s often hard to tell the
    fine-line between offtopic and ontopic for those). Since there are
    many who would not want to have to see any of them that aren’t
    directly related to the module they are working on, I don’t think
    these should appear (other than maybe in summary form) on the
    “filtered d-d-l” list I was thinking of. (threads that affect more
    than one module, assuming that there was no other relevant mailing
    list or place to discuss, should be allowed on the “filtered d-d-l”
    list)
  • consensus threads are ontopic for d-d-l, but are huge and many
    people working on just one module and merely want to know the basics
    of what is going on don’t care about these (these exact threads have
    been the final reason to cause me to unsubscribe from d-d-l more than
    once in the past because I just couldn’t keep up and hated manually
    filtering–yes, I resubscribed later for various reasons). One or
    more summary emails would be much better for many people
  • Some threads are more than just on topic on d-d-l, they’re sorely
    needed (think of the ARC discussion and providing better stability for
    3rd party developers; this was one of the coolest recent threads on
    the list). But these can still be extremely long. Again, many
    who are only working on a single module and merely want to keep a
    basic idea of what is going on would be much better served with a
    quick summary (or summaries since it may be nice to point out the
    thread early on with occasional updates considering its importance)
    and a link to the thread on d-d-l.
  • When people post things who don’t know the rules, everyone ends
    up getting at least two posts that aren’t useful to them: (1) the
    original email, (2) the email directing that person where they should
    ask the question. That’s fine on d-d-l. I would like a list where
    you don’t have to see that, because d-d-l is just too high a volume
    for many, many people to follow. Again, a “filtered d-d-l” list seems
    that it would do the job nicely

Now, of course, there are likely technical issues or other problems
with the ideas I had in mind. I’m not a gnome-sysadmin. I have no
important role with mailing lists (well, other than moderator for
gnome-bugsquad and bugmaster). I don’t even understand much of how
they work. I’m not interested in doing the work necessary to
implement my ideas (I would be, but it sounds like a lot of
effort…). If I had the experience and thought the ideas were sound
and I was willing to put effort where my mouth was, I would have
posted on d-d-l instead of in my blog. You need not worry about my
ideas on this topic. 😉