[balug-admin] (forw) Re: (moderation, job postings, etc.)

[Michael Paoli]

I thought I recalled such an option ... perhaps it's buried in
the details.  Looking again, I see:
Should the list moderators get immediate notice of new requests, as well as
daily notices about collected ones? [ ] No   [X] Yes
And was thinking we ought to change that to: [X] No   [ ] Yes
>From the linked "help" text, we have (_emphasis_ added):
balug-announce Mailing list Configuration Help
admin_immed_notify Option
admin_immed_notify (general): Should the list moderators get immediate notice of
new requests, as well as daily notices about collected ones?

List moderators (and list administrators) are sent daily reminders of requests
pending approval, like subscriptions to a moderated list, or _postings that are
being held for one reason or another_. Setting this option causes notices to be
sent immediately on the arrival of new requests as well.

I was thinking, if no one (or not of the list administrators/moderators)
object, we probably ought to change that option to No, and that would
cut down the "annoyance" factor of the "nag" e-mails (perhaps also
encouraging more folks, as/if needed/warranted to get themselves also
added so they get those "nag" e-mails too).  Again, I think it's
exceedingly rare (if ever) that items that get held for moderation
require moderators to know about their being held "immediately", as
opposed to having a delay of up to 24 hours before they're modified.
So I'd tend to think it's probably more beneficial to flip that
immediate notification option to No ... and for all 3 BALUG lists.

Of course I'm also hoping the option behaves as "advertised" (documented).

Quoting Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>:

> Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu):
> 
> > Might we want to tweak the configuration so the "nag" e-mails only
> > go out at most once per day?
> 
> Unfortunately, I know of none.  There's an option of enabling or
> suppressing immediate notice of pending _subscribe_ requests (for
> mailing lists requiring listadmin approval on join requests), such that
> those are sent only in the daily reminder batch.  Or you might be
> thinking of the digest mode option for _list_ mail sent to subscribers
> -- as distinct from moderation-needed (nagmail) notices to
> listadmins/moderators.
> 
> We could set "Discard held messages older than this number of days. Use
> 0 for no automatic discarding." to something other than the zero
> default -- say, to one day.  That would lose most spam, at the risk of
> occasionally discarding something legitimate.
> 
> The above is a poor remedy, attempting to partially compensate for
> Dreamhost being basically pretty incompetent at its task of spam-rejection 
> at the MTA level.  Just to clarify:  That is not a complaint, but I
> think it's helpful to recognise the fact, if only to clarify what
> exactly Michael's talking about:  Most people reading balug-admin will
> be unaware of this, but the listadmins are called upon to "moderate"
> some 15-20 held non-subscriber postings per day, aimed at each of our
> mailing lists, essentially all of those being spam (mostly Japanese).
> 
> I personally do a _much_ better job of spam-rejection at my own MTA, and
> nobody's paying me for that.  Dreamhost is screwing up the same task by
> the numbers, and this is an important (if difficult) part of their _job_.
> 
> BALUG is currently, via its moderation messages and spam sent directly
> to Mailman *-owner and *-bounces mailboxes, the second biggest source of
> spam in my life, vying for first place with Bay Area FreeBSD User
> Group's Mailman addresses (a group for which I also do listadmin duty).