[License-discuss] Moderator Advice

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Lawrence Rosen (lrosen at rosenlaw.com):

> That said, I remain concerned about our antique mailing list procedures that impose tricky processing exceptions merely to defeat spam. 

With great respect:  It's not that.

The GNU Mailman default setting of 10 maximum To: and Cc: recipients for a 
posting to propagate through without being queued for manual approval
is, in my experience, about right, even though the de-facto limit with
that default setting appears to be 1 or 2 fewer (probably a fencepost
error in the code).  Mail with a higher number of To: and Cc: recipients 
has a very high correlation with spamicity and with posting misbehaviour 
such as attempts to foment cross-mailing-list flamewars.

The listadmins could, if they wish, (say) double that default number,
raising the limit to 20.  I'm betting that a significantly higher amount
of problematic traffic would get through over time (albeit I could be
wrong).

But, additionally, as a reminder, what Simon actually suggested was that
people avoid _cross-posting_.  I concur that this is a good suggestion for 
numerous reasons, including it making a lot more work for the listadmins
of each included forum (given limited overlap of the subscriber bases).
A better practice, if you wish to have a similar discussion on multiple
mailing lists, is to post to each one separately.  Yes, that's not the
least-effort course of action.  You'll probably have noticed that The
Right Thing seldom is.  ;->

> I am frustrated that my "reply-all" can cause a multi-day delay in the
> dissemination of my "deep wisdom" or delay the "deep wisdom" of my
> colleagues here. 

IIRC, the problem wasn't reply-all as such (which is A Good Thing), but
rather inclusion of a rather large number of To: and Cc: recipients in
part because of cross-posting across multiple mailing lists.  Which gets
us back to Simon's point.