NEW CYPHERPUNKS LIST (was Re: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up")

[Adam Back]

I wish people would give subject fields which stand out to posts of
significant interest, other wise they tend to get lost in the noise.
(I have corrected this :-)

Sten Drescher <stend at sten.tivoli.com> writes:
> >>>>> John Gilmore writes:
> 
> JG> Sandy has agreed to continue moderation through the end of the
> JG> original 1-month experiment (through Feb 19).  And it's a good
> JG> thing, too, because the "cypherpunks community" had better get off
> JG> its whining butt in the next ten days, or it will no longer exist.
> 
> [...]
> 
> JG> This is a "put up or shut up" to the cypherpunks community.
> 
> 	This appears to be as good a time as any to announce that I'm
> "putting up".  I've already taken steps, along with Jim Choate, to
> start a network of majordomos hosting a Cypherpunks mailing list.  I
> didn't intend to announce this until Jim and I had gotten the first
> pair of 'domos working properly, but this means that we'll need to
> speed things up.  Our intention is to have a set of majordomos which
> are intersubscribed to a cypherpunks list on each one, with measures
> taken to ensure that mail loops don't develop.  
>
> 	John, I'd appreciate your permission to use your Cypherpunks
> welcome message as the basis for the welcome message of this new list.
> Also, while we will make every effort to have this new list available
> for subscriptions by Feb 20, I'd appreciate it if you could consider
> making the current list available for a short period longer if we
> encounter unanticipated difficulties.

First, thanks for your efforts!  (I had just spent a couple of hours
putting together a web page, and collecting information to organise
something, but you beat me to it.)  As I have spent some time on it,
I'll contribute what I had planned:

As a stop gap measure you could create a standard majordomo at the
beefiest of your 'domo hosts.

Or you could create a quick 'n dirty mail exploder, by taking the
current subscribers, and putting 100 mail addresses in a .forward file
at each <mail-exploder at domo.host>, and having the central 'domo with
an initial subscription list all the mail-exploders, plus all those
who subscribe afterwards.

Buys use some time to get to iron out the wrinkles in the distributed
list scheme.

As a simpler alternative to the mutually subscribed majordomo's you
might consider using mail-exploders for the final solution: set up
mail exploders which soley forward posts to subscribers (ie do not
accept posts).  The mail-exploder would be an appropriately
configured/modified majordomo itself.  Have a central majordomo which
accepts incoming posts, and forwards them to the mail-exploders.  The
central 'domo would also forward subscribe/unsubscribe to a random/the
correct(or all) majordomos.

Final comment: perhaps you've investigated this, but what Perry
Metzger has for the majordomo running cryptography at c2.net is excellent
at stopping people forging subscribe and unsubscribe messages.

The output looks like this:

: To: A.Back at exeter.ac.uk
: From: Majordomo at c2.net
: Subject: Confirmation for subscribe cryptography
: 
: Someone (possibly you) has requested that your email address be added
: to or deleted from the mailing list "cryptography at c2.net".
: 
: If you really want this action to be taken, please send the following
: commands (exactly as shown) back to "Majordomo at c2.net":
: 
:         auth abcd1234 subscribe cryptography A.Back at exeter.ac.uk
: 
: If you do not want to this action taken, just ignore this message and
: no action will be taken.

And would really cut down the nuisance of people subscribing others
without their knowledge.

Once, again thanks muchly for your's and Jim Ravage's efforts,

Adam
--
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