[License-discuss] Moderator Advice

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Lawrence Rosen (lrosen at rosenlaw.com)i, who I think was
addressing this question to Simon Phipps:

> I dislike mailman defaults. Why are you moderating my emails at all?
> Or John Cowan's? Or Henrik Ingo's? 

I think there's some confusion here caused by inexact wording and the
word 'moderated' having overloaded meanings:

Simon Philpps (part of a group of OSI listadmins) mentioned having to
appprove several recent postings from the listadmin queue that were held
because of 'too many recipients'.  The Mailman default setting for this
item ('Ceiling on acceptable number of recipients for a posting', on
page Privacy Options, Recipient Filters) is 10, though in practice the
filter seems to trigger on a slightly lower number of recipients.

I infer that Simon, when he spoke of having to 'moderate through'
postings, meant merely ones that landed in the listadmin queue.  He was
quite correctly and very benignly giving people advice on how to avoid
the admin queue.

license-discuss appears to not set any subscriber's 'moderated' flag by
default -- which again is GNU Mailman's default configuration.  So, I
strongly suspect that you (Lawrence), and John, and Henrik, do _not_ 
have that flag set.  (IMO:) Smart list administration, like smart system
administration, aspires to automate, to limit manual exception-handling to
a bare minimum.



> I also moderate an opensource.org mailing list. What a drag to discard
> or ignore spam every day!

The only effective way to reduce that, IMO, is to improve automated
spam-rejection at the receiving MTA, which is a hard problem.  Short of
that, set a short retention period (I like 3 days) on 'Discard held
messages older than this number of days', which is at the bottom of the
General Options page -- where GNU Mailman's default is zero (no
automatic discarding).  A short retention period makes spam expire out
of queue rapidly without listadmin work.  Three-day retention gives
listadmins enough time to notice held non-spam over a holiday weekend.