On Mon, 7 Aug 2000, Bryan Nolen wrote:
>> Shall we only allow messages from subscribed members? Moderate? Shut the
>> lists down? Just deal?
>
>Definatly close the list to ONLY subscribers...
>
Bad plan. This is political speech here; people need to be
able to speak anonymously. Moderation is also a bad plan; it
creates a central point of control at which the list could be
monitored, shut down, or sabotaged.
"Just Deal" though, is actually pretty easy with procmail.
I find that a good .procmailrc keeps the S/N ratio acceptably high.
Start by tossing everything from egroups and aol, and everything that
mentions "du jour" or "gagler" in the header. After that, just
look for key phrases in the subject line, (such as "welcome to",
"unable to process", "loans", "work at home", "business opportunity",
"retire in", "retirement", etc.) and you can get the S/N back up
to at least 70%.
If you're an advanced procmail scripter, you can write the script
to be a little more suspicious of stuff sent to the "toad.com"
node than to the other nodes: I've been noticing that a good
three-quarters of the spam is coming through toad.
It has been frightening of late though, how much incoming traffic
has been getting autofiled in my "spam" folder from cpunks; I think
if all that crap were going in my "cypherpunks" folder, S/N would
be under 10% at this point.
However, even with my filters on it, I've been noticing that the
amount of actual "content" has been dropping off. It looks like
folks are unwilling to wade through the spam and keep the discussions
going, which is sad.
Bear
