Banning annoying users

[Mark M.]

On Tue, 24 Sep 1996, Ray Arachelian wrote:

> This is wonderful in theory -- and in practice up until now, but what 
> happens when someone decides "Oh, I hate this list and Tim, let me write 
> a spam bot to anonymously spam the this into oblivion?"  There is such a 
> thing as denial of service via spamming.  It's quite easy to do for 
> someone who knows how to run sendmail and knows how to write a shell 
> script or a small program.  Hell, I could write one of those in less than 
> 1 minute.
> 
> As for me being banned, I doubt it, I'm not posting daily Tim warnings 
> and such spams.  yeah, banning someone off the list for their political 
> or even crypto views is silly.  Banning someone for spamming is another 
> issue.
> 
> There is no reason we can't allow posts from those who are not subscribed 
> to the list.  There's also no reason that we can't have someone moderate 
> those posts before they make it to the list to remove the spams - mind 
> you not to moderate the contents, but to remove repeating annoying spam 
> and advertisement.

This scheme would not allow people using anonymous remailers to post to the
list.  If you let posts through anonymous remailers through, then the refusal
to allow anyone not subscribed to post becomes meaningless.  Spam can be
prevented by looking for a large number of messages delivered at about the same
time.  There's no need to involve a moderator.

Mark
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