John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> writes:
I agree with Sandy Sandfort and many others that things have gotten way out of hand on the list. He and I feel that the only proposed solutions likely to succeed involve inserting human judgement in the cypherpunks posting process, rather than mere automation. So I am supporting this experiment, primarily by setting up a few more mailing lists on Toad and by automatically moving the current set of subscribers to the moderated list. You will be able to move yourselves back to the unedited list if you don't want to participate in the experiment, or if, partway through, you decide you don't like the results.
Have you considered using a system like NoCeM (see http://www.cm.org)? I think such a system has many advantages over centrally controlled moderation. The basic idea of NoCeM is that instead of moderating a newsgroup or mailing list, people post lists of articles to be ignored, and you can configure your mail/newsreader to pay attention to NoCeM's by whichever people you trust. NoCeM would prevent any message delays which moderation might introduce (sure, I might see the last few hours worth of spam, but at least when I come back after a week away I don't have to wade through a week's worth of "Timmy May hurt my feelings, blah blah blah"). This means the more frequently you read the mailing list, the more spam you will see--quite an acceptable trade-off given that people who check the list often are probably those who would want to avoid message delays. NoCeM would also prevent anyone from accusing you of censorship. Even if such accusations are weeded from the list (via moderation), it's still a drag to lend credibility to such asinine accusations by actually blocking those people's posts. NoCeM would ensure that no one is held legally responsible for the contents of someone else's messages. If we continue to get important messages like implementations of the RC2 and RC4 ciphers, a moderator could be found responsible for approving such an article. Obviously there are some issues related to NoCeM. Not all mail- and newsreaders support NoCeM. However, there are definitely solutions to those problems. For instance, a perl script could be used to delay messages and apply NoCeM's, so that people can subscribe to customized filtered versions of the list. I might even be willing to write such software if there is interest.