The sbcl-announce list is now 100% human-moderated. (Re: spam)

first, a proper announcement:

I have tweaked the list configuration to enable what Mailman calls
"emergency moderation": all postings should be held until I surf to
the admin URL, give the admin password, and click radiobuttons to
determine their fate. This seems a very practical solution for such a
low-traffic list, and assuming that it works as documented, it should
reliably stop spam on sbcl-announce, which should return to being a
SBCL announcements list, probably mostly monthly release announcements
as before.


then, some words of explanation and discussion:

On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 11:28:36AM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Okay, are the people running this mailing list completely asleep at
> the wheel, or what? This is now my third posting in four days -- one
> would expect that by now someone would have noticed. Hello? Anyone
> home??? Messages like the attached would be impossible except for the
> fact that somehow an announce mailing list has been left OPEN. Please
> fix it already.

The extra days of sbcl-announce spam are my fault. It's not plural
people, it's me; I'm the only list admin, and you're quite right that
I haven't paid much attention.

As many people will have already noticed, these days with or without
scolding, even with repeated punctuation marks, I find I don't have
much energy for administrative stuff in general, or for various SBCL
stuff that I used to do quite a lot of. Socially SBCL is not exactly
thankless work, but neither is the social feedback of the sort that
consistently motivates me, and I find I have much less technical
motivation than I used to.

Possibly part of my lack of technical motivation to hack SBCL is for a
"success disaster" perverse sort of reason: SBCL seems good enough for
a lot of the stuff that I want to do with it. I notice that I have
used many other free software systems heavily --- such as half a dozen
programmer's editors, notably uemacs, gnu emacs, and some vi variants
--- without being ever being highly motivated to hack them, because
although they were far from perfect, they were good enough. These days
I am still very fond of SBCL, and I want to avoid seeing it messed up,
but it has become unusual for me to get so frustrated at something
SBCLish that fixing it seems pressing. (And perhaps it has been
particularly unusual this year partly because I have mostly worked on
proof-of-concept programs prototyping new algorithms, rather than
production code.)

Considering my undermotivated state and lackadaisical performance,
arguably I shouldn't be the maillist admin. Perhaps, for that matter,
I shouldn't be the project admin either; not only do I lack
motivation, but the work I have done on SBCL was mostly so long ago
that sometimes I feel I lack moral authority as well. If some
plausible replacement (such as some coalition of developers) wants to
nominate itself as a replacement, it'd probably be fine with me. But
until and unless a suitable replacement is available, you should
expect a certain relaxedness in administration.

-- 
William Harold Newman <[email protected]>
PGP key fingerprint 85 CE 1C BA 79 8D 51 8C  B9 25 FB EE E0 C3 E5 7C
Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit. -- Jonathan Swift's epitaph

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