Cos, Please note, I am not arguing against your points, nor have I been. I considered them valid, posted them to the membership for discussion, and stated my personal opinion in support of confirmations; so I'm not too sure who you're ranting at here.
I bring it up for discussion because thats the way we do things here, at least for non-emergency changes to the SOP. Ideologies are quite wide-ranging on this list (I'll rehash the list debate on why blocking open relays encourages SPAM to make my point if necessary :-), so personally I don't assume anything as a no-brainer. For the current record, we have had a couple of public vocal postings in-favor of confirmations, two private posts to me of the ilk "it's been working fine, so if it ain't broke...", and one private post in support of confirmations. This topic has been being discussed for two days now and I've heard no strong objections, so unless anyone can swing a valid counter-point, I'll make the change today. -Justin On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 01:18:16PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] scribed to To [EMAIL PROTECTED]: > [BTW, I am only on the announce list, so if there's been any > discussion on bblisa not cc'd to me, I haven't seen it.] > > "Justin S. Peavey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Thanks Tabor. Folks, to be clear - I am not advocating the currently > > policies, just stating them as they stand and implementing them. My > > personal opinion tends toward limiting the list posting to > > subscribers-only and requiring confirmation. > > I never said anything about limiting list posting. I'm not even on > the discussion list :) As Tabor said, that's something that can be > debated, with merits on both sides. If I were subscribing to the main > list I'd probably argue for keeping posting open until there were a > problem, and closing it only then. > > However, requiring confirmation for subscription is an absolute no > brainer. It needs to be done on every Internet-accessible mailing > list, no exceptions. I'm surprised anyone would even bring it up > as a discussion topic. Five years ago, yeah, people debated this. > But today? On a mailing list full of sysadmins? > > In the early 90s plenty of sites had guest accounts with no passwords, > or well known published passwords. If you pointed out the existence > of such an account to an admin today, though, you'd expect a response > of "oops, thanks for pointing it out" followed by a quick fix. Not a > discussion about whether they want to have open accounts accessible > from the net because it's been that way in the past and they haven't > suffered a lot of abuse of it yet. > > Pranksters, spammers, and people with grudges, are using unconfirmed > subscription mailing lists as their tools on a regular basis. When > they do this, both the list and the unwitting new subscribers are the > victims, everyone is confused, recriminations flow, and nobody knows > who actually is to blame. The list admins are responsible for this. > When I receive unwanted email, write back to complain, and am told by > some list admin that my address was subscribed to the list and it's > not their fault they didn't know I didn't want to subscribe, they have > no way to know who subscribed me... I know who to blame. It is their > responsibility, because they run a list that doesn't require positive > confirmation of subscriptions, and their evasion carries no weight. > When this happens to bblisa, do you want people complaining to your > ISP and to their ISP that you're running a spam list? > > I feel like I'm back in the mid 90s, to even have to say this. > > "OSI is a beautiful dream, and TCP/IP is living it!" -- Justin S. Peavey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Back Bay LISA" List Administrator http://www.bblisa.org --- Send mail for the `bblisa' mailing list to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'. Mail administrative requests to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.
