Abusive cancels from miakibot (bis)

Following a previous discussion on that I just want to remind the 
(approximate) recent history.

A few months ago (in 2021, maybe 2020, I don't remember exactly) Olivier 
Miakinen (O.M.) wrote a cancel bot named "miakibot" to clean up the fr.* 
hierarchy from spam etc, as many cancels were done manually before that.

At the begining all was OK, nobody was complaining, and most people were 
even praising it. There was an old FAQ on fr.* about legit cancels and 
the bot was essentially cancelling according to this FAQ.

At the same time a usenaut, whose latest incarnation is known as "Néo 
L'élu", who was posting tons of articles, always with the same kind of 
subject (about religion, atheism...), with crossposts and no follow-up. 
The guy was indeed a pain in the ass, but most of time he was not 
violating any formal rule of fr.* that could justify the cancellation of 
his posts.

To try limiting the amount of messages from Néo we thought about 
updating the FAQ to forbid crossposts without fu2 between fr.* and 
another hierarchy (as a matter of fact Néo was crossposting on 
francom.*). We took this opportunity to completely rewrite the FAQ, as 
we felt it was outdated. There are has been a discussion on that last 
automn on the group fr.usenet.abuse.d, and we reached a consensus on a 
new FAQ.

However, soon after that O.M. decided to cancel ALL posts from Néo, even 
the ones that were not violating the rules described in the FAQ. The 
reason he gave was that Néo was flooding fr.* anyway. This is a kind of 
indivual UDP, and several people expressed that such an extreme decision 
should not be taken by a single person, and that a *consensus* should be 
obtained on fr.usenet.abuse.d.

O.M. then opened a discussion about that, and about some other 
individual UDPs applied to some other spammers/flooders. He obtained 
large majorities for almost everything, except for Néo. There was just a 
small majority (12 out of 22) in favour of the UDP on Néo.

One can endlessly argue about "what is a consensus". A common and 
pragmatic definition is "a large majority". Still one can argue about 
"how large ?", but what is sure is that a 12 out of 22 is NOT a large 
majority, and hence is NOT a consensus.

By the meantime the miakibot was still cancelling ALL articles from Néo, 
and O.M. didn't want to change anything. After a while, however, and 
because of many protests, he stopped cancelling Néo.

But in march 2022 he resumed cancelling Néo. Just, instead of cancelling 
all articles, he allowed him to post on a few selected groups 
(fr.sci.zetetique and the groups related to the Apple Mac), and without 
any crosspost. All other articles were cancelled. And again it was his 
own decision, taken without any consensus.

Somehow acknowleging the problem, O.M. used a different "From" for the 
cancel articles on Néo: "miakibot2 <[email protected]>" instead of 
"miakibot <[email protected]>".

Soon after he started to cancel the answers to cancelled articles. This 
would be reasonnable if all the cancels were legit in the first place, 
which is not the case. Moreover no consensus has been obtained for 
cancelling the answers to cancelled articles. The "From" for these 
cancel articles is "miakibot3 <[email protected]>"

So at the moment we have :

- miakibot: legit cancel articles, supported by the FAQ on legit cancels 
or by a consensus

- miakibot2: abusive cancel articles, not supported by the FAQ or by a 
consensus

- miakibot3: abusive cancel articles, not supported by the FAQ or by a 
consensus

At least, cancel articles from miakibot2 and miakibot3 should not be 
honored.

Cancel articles from miakibot are legit at the moment, but one can 
wonder if O.M. can be trusted on the long term. At first he looks opened 
to discussions, but he is actually always deciding on his own, without 
bothering about a consensus, and he is convinced that his point of view 
is always the right one (if you do not agree with him, then you're just 
a troll). Also it is worth mentioning a massive abusive cancellation 
last year, when he *retroactively* cancelled thousands of articles of a 
single usenaut. Later on, he admitted that he did that because he had 
been upset by this usenaut. Giving the atomic bomb to someone who is 
emotionnaly not that stable is maybe not a good idea...

Note: there is currently no more "miakibot2" cancel article, but the 
reason is just that "Néo" has disappeared from fr.* (his Eternal 
September account has apparently been suppressed because of violations 
of conditions of service"). He may come back, or O.M. may decide one day 
or another to put a UDP on someone else... So blocking miakibot2 (and 
miakibot3) is still appropriate.

Note 2: all of this also raises some questions about the alphanet.ch 
server. Not only O.M. uses this server to send the abusive cancel 
articles, but the Alphanet newsmaster is indeed fully supporting him.