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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: So, What Now, NANOG? Was: Request response [important]
On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, Daniel Golding wrote: > Its time to figure out what to do about this, employing a proactive stance. > The answer is not "start a new mailing list". Names have power, as they say, > and NANOG has the juice. So, a few simple proposals for people to chew > over... > > 1) Turn on list moderation and recruit a corp of volunteer moderators. The > FAQ volunteers did a good job, BTW. Dave Farber's IP list (not Internet > Protocol, its Interesting People), is a good example of a low volume > moderated list. Direct moderation of every post I don't particularly like - this shuts free speach which is important and that is seed as bad for moderator may not be for many others; besides it creates an unfortunate delay and some subjects posted to the list were of most value when being posted within that short period of time - like when particular fiber cut occured or when somebody needs immediate help from such and such network, etc. One of the options to direct moderation that some lists use is to better identify subjects by main grouping. Usually by adding [subject group] on the subject line and if you're not interested in anything [email-related] for example, you'd ignore such threads from the start and only focus on [bgp-routing] for example. We could come up with acceptable list of subjects and much later require every posted to use them when the people become familiar with how to do this. Moderator can change the grouping if it has not been chosen appropriately and post to the maillist when the subject should be closed. Those who regularly do not choose group correct can be set so that their posts are moderated. Setting subject would also some effect on viruses that would not be able to provide posts with correct subject either. > 2) Convert this list into a blog or discussion forum with some sort of > moderation. Yes, the idea of SlashNog is disturbing, but email is a pretty > weak medium at this point in time, for multipoint communications of an > important nature. We have stuff like RSS that may be better suited. Not everybody agrees we are rather used to email and mail lists, particularly people here I suspect. > 3) Figure out a better way to "gatekeep" nanog-post, to keep the number of > permitted posters down and to confirm their identities. > > This forum is not of any use if any significant percentage of the posters > are teenage IRC-lurking hackers or spammers. We need to "do the Darwin" - > change or die. Regarding those posting anonymously trying to go after others, this is problem with email in general that we either have to allow newcomer to communicate with you (presumed trust) which opens it up for abuse we all now hate or we can moderate ourselve to just few trusted persons and verify everybody new (which approach is also now hated by some for being very intrusive on especially when mail lists get involved). I'm not certain how we can deal with it properly in general, but PGP seems to answer this in that person's identity must be verified by others. Possibly this can be adapted either directly (require digital signature) or indirectly that new poster must be confirmed by two existing mail list members to be able to post. Or possibly simpler approach is that first-time posters are by default moderated and then after say 4 or 5 posts, it is automaticly removed. P.S. I'm not sure the situation with NANOG-l is that bad. Any high-traffic list has its own noise problems in general and I think it has not been that high here that you could not easily just ignore the thread when it turns into noisem, nor is amount of spam (non-existant) or viruses (none up until recently). I've seen it a lot worth ... --- William Leibzon Elan Networks [email protected]
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