How to deal with mailing list ownership & moderators & spam to the lists?

Erik Huelsmann <[email protected]> Sat, 1 Feb 2025 13:22:08 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.lisp.common-lisp-net.devel
Message-ID <CACOoB6jvTHnFX3eANGftbd_AdqW9yXhHyrqxtsSAiP6xW-v3Ng@mail.gmail.com>
Hi,

Daily, my mailbox is bombarded with mails reminding me to moderate mailing
list traffic on common-lisp.net. On occasion I have acted on these
messages, if I saw one come by where genuine traffic was held. Most of the
time, they are mails trying to sell eBikes and other junk, though. While I
haven't acted much on them, they do present distraction, both of genuine
mail traffic as well as in my mind. I want to remove that distraction.

Out of curiosity, I picked the last reminder I received this morning. It
was from cells-devel@ . There are no moderators, which means that reminders
go to the owners: Kenny Tilton and cl-net root@ (that is: Mark Evenson,
Dave Cooper, Philipp Marek and me).

There is a list of 333 moderations waiting. Accumulated between August 2024
and today. Actual list traffic: 1 mail in 2020 (without response!) and the
last one before that was from 2012.

The before-last reminder was to cffi-devel@. There 113 moderations are
waiting. Last and before-last active mail threads (including replies) are
from 2023 and 2021 respectively. Owner of the list are Luis Oliveira and
root@; again, no moderators.  Conclusion: Although not as bad as with
cells, nobody is acting on these reminders for cffi-devel either.

The one before that: cl-opengl-devel@. Same story: 95 waiting moderations,
most recent mail threads from 2022 and 2020.


So, I see the following options (other than adding mail filters which
simply delete these things on my side):

1. Remove root@ from the list of owners -- which presumably means root@
can't help with admin tasks for these mailing lists anymore
2. Copy the owners - excluding root@ - to the moderators so the flow to
root@ stops
3. Forcibly set mailing lists to drop non-member posts - the current
default seems to be to hold for moderation

Additionally, we could archive (remove submission possibility) for mailing
lists which haven't received a single post for more than 5(?) or 7(?) or
... years.

I'm looking for the best way forward for common-lisp.net here, not for my
personal mailbox. What do you say?

-- 
Bye,

Erik.

http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.
Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.