Re: [gentoo-dev] Mailing list moderation and community openness

[Gregory Woodbury <redwolfe@gmail.com>]

John Levine, author of "The Internet For Dummies," once set up a robo-moderation
process for the Usenet newsgroup soc.religion.unitarian-univ
(Unitarian Universalists).
The group, along with most of Usenet, ultimately "died" due to lack of
attention from
the moderators, who failed to curb one of their own.

However, the robo-moderator worked quite well, and still is
technically in-place. The
first post by a person generated an email to the poster to verify the
email addres,
and required the poster to reply with a confirmation. The posts then
went through
without anyone having to approve or whilelist things.  If a poster subsequently
became a "problem" their postings could be placed in a moderation
required status,
and some human would evelute the posts and handle the quelling of off-topic or
flame generating posts. In extreme cases, posters could be banned for
varying periods
of time.

The programs where quite powerful, and amazingly simple and elegant to implent.
The source is available, and should be easily adapted for practically
any system with
bash shell hook capabilities. The infra team might want to look at
that code and try
something like it.  Some addresses can be injected at setup time requiring human
action before posts are approved (Rejected posts would be sent back to the perp
requesting re-writing or abandoning.

The moderators did not have to login anywhere to work with the bot,
all interactions
were done via email.  The system is/was quite nice, and my mangled memories
should not be the deciding factors when looking at it.

Such a system might well serve as a means of allowing fully free entry into the
list, while still providing the ability to control things if it gets
out of hand.

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 1:19 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 12:55 PM, R0b0t1 <r030t1@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I can't tell, and I suspect other people can't either.
>>
>
> This is the crux of the issue.  Decisions involving people issues are
> made behind closed doors, which means that others are not free to
> confirm for themselves whether those actions are correct.  This tends
> to lead to ongoing debate over whether those decisions were
> appropriate, with everybody arguing from their own knowledge, and the
> only ones who know the information used to make the decision are
> barred from talking about it.  This is basically a debate where
> participation is limited to the ignorant, at least as far as the
> particular details go (the general principles are debated by all).
>
> That said, even if the decisions were made in the open I wouldn't
> expect all to agree with them.
>
> Ultimately though there are pros and cons to making these kinds of
> decisions in the open, and there is not universal agreement regarding
> how these situations ought to be handled.  We can either fight about
> it until the end of time, or we can agree on some way to determine
> what approach we are going to take and then support it (perhaps
> begrudgingly).  Right now the mechanism that we have in place is the
> Council.  The only other mechanism I could see that would make any
> sense would be a referendum on the issue.  That gets unwieldy if we
> try to apply it to every little decision, but maybe for the big
> picture issues it would make sense.
>
> However, I think a lot of people would be surprised at the outcome.
> We all assume that we're all here for the same reasons, but as I
> commented on my blog Gentoo is a bit unique among distros and many of
> us are here for very different reasons, and have different priorities.
> Also, there is sometimes a tendency to assume that all FOSS projects
> work the same way.  When I was listening to a talk about how one of
> the BSDs dealt with these kinds of issues I was shocked to discover
> that much of their dev communications happens on completely closed
> lists (not just closed to posting, but to reading as well).  Gentoo
> has the gentoo-core list but it is very low traffic and it tends to be
> used for things like swapping cell phone numbers before conferences.
> When anything substantive comes up there are usually several people
> who chime in to rightly point out that this talk belongs on a public
> list.
>
> Bottom line is that there are a lot of different ways projects can
> run, and they all have their pros and cons.  A lot of the FOSS we
> depend on actually gets built or discussed behind closed doors.  I
> doubt many of us want Gentoo to go that far, but I suspect there is a
> lot of interest in taking smaller steps in that general direction.
>
> --
> Rich
>



-- 
G.Wolfe Woodbury
redwolfe@gmail.com