Re: [Razor-users] Turning Razor into a censorship tool

[Steve Vance]

I don't really have any authority to have this opinion, other than that I have been subscribed to this mailing list for a year and a half. But here goes.

Razor is mildly dependent on people reporting spams, but it is desperately dependent on people not reporting non-spams. There is a BIG difference. If you send in real spams, ho hum, there are lots of people doing that, but thank you for your support. But if you report one non-spam incorrectly, you are pissing in the drinking water, this is a BAD BAD BAD thing. Anyone who does so should be banished, or at least severely chastised.

If someone reports an e-mail that is just too obviously from an improper spamtrap or otherwise completely clueless user, their trust rating should INSTANTLY go down by about 1000 points or so. They are not participating constructively in the Razor community. They are not "playing by the rules". For whatever reason--we don't care why--they screwed up and submitted something that isn't spam. It doesn't matter how many spams that they have also accurately reported, we can do without their "help" for a long time, or perhaps forever! At least, that's my feeling about this topic. It's like that Dirty Harry movie, where there's a scene on a police firing range--you "shot a good guy".

This is actually off the topic of turning Razor into a censorship tool. Sorry. People can probably figure out ways to "game" the system, we will have to keep thinking up ways to thwart that. Separate topic. This is about people reporting EFF newsletters, Dilbert newsletters, things from SourceForge, CERT virus alerts, a short list of things that might not be double-opt-in, but they are Obviously Not Spam! 99% of all spams are obviously spam! If you are in doubt as to whether it might not be a spam, then don't you dare submit it!

Of course, I don't have any suggestions about how to implement the banishment idea. Perhaps Vipul and Jordan could stay up late nights looking at revokes, and pressing a "Bozo Override" button when necessary.
 

Marco Percale wrote:

The idea that there is nothing that I can do to stop our newsletter from being blacklisted by Razor is unacceptable. That would definitely be the wrong answer.

Peter J. Holzer wrote:

On 2003-02-22 08:24:13 -0800, Marc Perkel wrote:

You're missing the point. It doesn't matter how I have my own system 
setup to deal with spam. If I'm sending a newsletter to 30,000 people 
and the ISPs - who I have no control over - or the users have their 
system rely on the accuracy of Razor - then my newsletter gets censored 
because it is either blocked or it is classified in a manner that it 
ends up in a junk mail folder that is never read.

Yesterday Razor caused the Electronic Frontier Foundation's newsletter 
to not reach possibly thousands of subscribing members. I want to be 
able to prevent this from happening in the future.

You can't. Your subscribers can.

Suppose I have a malicous subscriber who falsely reports Effector as spam?

How do I contact the complaining person(s) so that I can remove them
from the list

You don't.

Unacceptable. An annonymous person can block the distribution of free speech to it's legitimate subscribing members.

and make sure this doesn't happen the next time?

You can just hope that the "possibly thousands" of your subscribers who
rely on razor will notice that your mails end up in their junk folder
and will revoke them. Then the trust level of the people reporting your
mails will decrease and they will stop to matter.

However - if the user pipes a lot of real spam to razor as a way of regaining trust then that would nullify that. Besides - by the time it gets revoked the delivery has already occurred and the damage is already done.