Jeroen,
A practice I used when I was diffserv chair and we had quite a lot
of off-topic postings was to create a second list, diffserv-interest
(which still exists BTW). The rule for diffserv@xxxxxxxx was "must
be relevant to a chartered work item" and the rule for diffserv-interest
was "must be relevant to diffserv technology."
This worked well, with active intervention by the chair to divert
off-topic threads to the -interest list. It doesn't raise any
issues for the standards process, which states that all consensus
points are settled on the WG mailing list. People only interested
in the standards work simply ignored the -interest list.
This is easy; any WG chair can do it today.
Brian
Jeroen Massar wrote:
Anthony G. Atkielski wrote:
Pekka Savola writes:
Why must each and every WG member be required to filter a person's
postings? Much more convenient to do so in one place.
Because each and every WG member is an individual, with his own ideas
of what he does or doesn't want to read, and imposing the same rules
upon everyone prevents members from making their own decisions. It
also imposes the decisions of a small minority upon the majority.
Here goes for a try... flame me off list if required.
As it is indeed quite controversial to 'block' people, maybe there can
be a solution that, though it will have overhead for listadmins, it will
help the process that the workinggroup is actually for in the first place.
In the several messages there have been brought up a number of solutions
to the problem where one or multiple entities are (deliberately)
flooding/overloading the mailinglists of workinggroups and other places
with off-topic messages.
There seem to be a couple of solutions, amongst which:
- Filtering based on source address at the receiver
- Filtering based on keywords, which has really bad side-effects.
- Blocking the sender at the mailinglist level.
- 3683 PR for complete full blockage of posting rights.
The first is reasonably fine, as you don't see the message of the entity
that one finds not useful, but you might see responses of others thus
this is still intrusive and you still get those messages which you
wanted to filter out. The second option might filter out messages which
you did want to read. Both still will get these messages in the
mailinglist archive, even though there was a consensus that those
messages are unwanted.
The third and fourth option are pretty definitive, no more messages from
that entity, but this might be seen as silencing this persons freedom of
speech.
My proposal to solve this issue but keeping everybody happy:
Two mailinglists: <wg>@ietf.org + full.<wg>@ietf.org
full.<wg>@ is completely open, anybody can post anything they want
though hopefully on topic on the subject of the workinggroup and of
course based on the source address having a subscription *1
full.<wg>@ is subscribed to <wg>@ thus full.wg gets everything
preserving, at least parts, of the freedom of speech that is wanted and
for the people who want to read a lot of mail everyday.
Initially everybody who signs up to the <wg>@ list can post to it.
When the consensus on the list is that a member is not participating
correctly, ignoring warnings etc, like currently this member can be
banned from the list for a temporary amount of time. The member can
still voice his opinions on the <wg>@ list. This thus allows him to
voice his concerns to the members that do want to read them. Like the
current 3683 PR the ban can become effectively indefinitely for the main
list, while the poster is still and always allowed on full.<wg>@.
The big concern here is of course that one could say that if you get
booted out of the group that your voice won't be heard as they are not
reading the other list. This is of course true, but one can raise their
concerns on the full list, for instance Google won't differentiate
between them and there will always be folks who will listen to it and
forward these concerns when they have valid argumentation. By posting
'good' messages to the full.<wg>@ list a member can also demonstrate
that he is really willing to contribute instead of disrupt. One of the
nicest controversies is of course what to determine good and bad,
starwars as an example, how bad are the jedi and how good are the sith,
it completely depends on the side you are on, nothing else. That all
boils down to trust and other factors, any mailinglist admin could abuse
his position to set the sender of an address to silently discard, SMTP
can have a CC: in the header and mailman will not forward the message to
that person and various other nice tricks.
I hope the above might give a better point to discuss all this over
instead of seeing replies like "that is not good" "see above" and other
comments without effective constructive arguments.
Greets,
Jeroen
*1 = to avoid the large amount of spam flowing to the various lists
which nicely get blocked because of subscription regulation.
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