On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Randy Bush wrote:
a look at the paper post i receive every day would lead me to
believe that an archive that includes unsolicited commercial post
would be on the order of ten times as large as that for legitimate
post. why will the internet email be any less polluted? and you
want folk to archive the <bleep>? so the search engines can have
even more hits on the slime? cool.
Spam and other kinds of unsolicited commercial post are a second order
problem. The issue on the table was objective review of moderator
actions.
In any case, I did say the archive need not contain "obvious" spam. For
me, "obvious spam" means I set a medium-high threshold for SpamAssassin
and discard it if it crosses the threshold. Other methods will work
equally well, including doing nothing.
Search engines are not our problem. In my experience they will figure
it out if they need to and deal with it. "Harvesters" are a second
order problem.
This is not rocket science. Many "second order" tweaks are possible.
Conceptually, the proposal is no different than the way local sites
would previously manage USENET newsgroups (roll off after 10, 20, or 30
days). Yes, lots of disk, but that is cheap enough these days. Heck, I
wouldn't even backup these particular archives.
Jim