Garrett D'Amore wrote: > I would like to propose to the board that "automatic bounce" > configuration of mailing lists be prohibited; all mail lists should have > at least one, and preferably more than one, identified moderator. If no > one is able to moderate the list, maybe the list itself isn't that > important.
The configuration of the individual lists is the responsibility of the list owner - there is no central policy. The last time a centralised policy was suggested - the removal of the accept wildcards - there was an uproar. > There also needs to be a process by which a list which has no active > moderators can either be reclaimed by someone else who is willing to > moderate, or decommissioned. Right now, I don't think there is any such > process. The last time we did a cleanup there were approximately 40,000 unmoderated messages in the queues, which had accumulated over quite some time. There are currently 88 lists with auto-reject set, and 40 with auto-discard set. However, as I've said, those settings are managed by the list owners, if people have issues with a particular list they need to contact the list owner. Because list moderation was clearly such an issue, all the moderation queues are now checked and cleared by the OSO ops team, usually twice a day. So if moderators *aren't* doing their jobs, any mails should still be released within a reasonable time. Of course, there's nothing we can do about messages that are rejected or discarded, as I said if there are issues in that area you need to contact the official list owner. > IMO, the Board, and the members of the website community, have been far > to cavalier about the handling of these lists. I think these mailing > lists are even more important than the actual web pages -- very little > actual collaboration happens on the web pages (at least in the > communities for which I'm a member) -- but a great deal does happen in > e-mail. I'm not exactly clear what you mean by 'cavalier', could you explain please? -- Alan Burlison --
