Ray Arachelian <sunder@brainlink.com> writes:
3. Not making the unmoderated list first-up (i.e., cutting posts first, then making the "full" list available later) is suspicious, or at least a bad idea.
What difference does it make if a message is delayed for 10-30 minutes? Why is it a bad idea or suspicious? If you post something and it doesn't make it at all, you can complain about it. Is that what you fear?
10-30 minutes is potentially far less than it would take. What about mail that arrives in the middle of the night, or what if all the moderators are away or busy. If you really want to filter cypherpunks@toad.com by default, fine. But is it too much to ask for those of us who don't want the filtering to request an unmoderated, undelayed list, with all headers intact (someone had suggested Approved headers be removed)? Remember, other people may want to run differently moderated versions of the list. If you add delay before secondary moderators can even get the stuff, you are unfairly penalizing those who use a better or more efficient filtering scheme, because those people will have to wait for the central authorities' moderation decisions before even their own moderators or auto-moderators get ahold of messages.
The point was to optimize the sendmail to send moderated messages first.
Fine for those who want the moderation, but why are you forcing everyone to use this scheme? There are plenty of moderation schemes that are way more cypherpunk than one central moderation authority. NoCeM is one great example. Obviously some people don't have the right software to experiment with this--fine they can subscribe to a centrally moderated list. But why not let those of us who write code experiment with other ways of moderating the list? Please. What does it cost anyone to have a separate mailing list which immediately gets all cypherpunks submissions? The only argument against this is "load", but that doesn't make sense. First of all, if someone subscribes to cypherpunks-raw instead of cypherpunks and cypherpunks-flames, the total number of messages is the same, and the amount of bandwith you might lose to split mult-RCPT messages is negligiable (and could easily be recouped by switching mailers, though that shouldn't even be necessary). More importantly, if some significant number of people really do want to subscribe to cypherpunks-raw (as in enough that you would even start to think about load), then maybe centralized moderation is not the way to go. What is the advantage of not having a cypherpunks-raw? I just don't understand it. It costs you nothing, it shows your willingness to compete with other moderators or moderation schemes, and it will make people a lot more confident that you aren't suppressing some messages from cypherpunks-flames list. If for some reason load really is the problem (though I can't see how), then can you set some maximum number of subscribers you would be willing to mail cypherpunks-raw to? I mean 50 people shouldn't be that big a deal, right? And if more than 50 want to subscribe and you think toad can't handle the load, I will run a mail exploder on a different machine.