I've posted on this subject many times in the past, and its something I like to brainstorm on. signal to noise problems on this list. generally, the moderator-specific approaches I find less palatable than techniques that can be automated. here are some more ideas for automated moderation techniques. 1. software called "grouplens" I've talked about here (search yahoo) has been used to rate articles. they found that there was a very high correlation between how long people spent reading articles and the "interesting" rating that they gave that article. hence, a proposal: cpunks have long advocated and hacked mailer programs to stick in crypto. how about sticking in a hack that tracks how long mail messages are being read, and send that info back to an auxilliary mailing list address. the list software keeps track of time spent reading articles and can allow people to screen the list based on the "most interesting articles". "send me only those articles that go over a threshhold of 500 combined human attention minutes". of course this can be messed up by hackers who try to skew the ratings. I would suggest a limit on the max time per article per person. 2. I like the idea of a system that keeps track of complaints against given users. it could keep track of the complaint/per age of every subscriber. e.g. hypothetical: LD gets 10 complaints per week, and TCM gets 30 per week on average, and it could allow people to screen the mail based on these numbers, such as a command "send me mail of all users below a 20 complaint/per week value". you could, for either of these approaches, have an "official screening value" in which the owner of the list adjusts these parameters to his liking. just more ideas. I like cpunks generally favor a technological fix that doesn't involve bottlenecks of individual moderator opinions. (2) would be pretty easy to implement inside existing mailing list software, at the majordomo side.