[ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
Dear types list, A new thread on academic announces moderation on coq-club ( https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/coq-club/2018-06/msg00104.html ) reminded me that some may be interested in discussing the types-announce moderation policy. (I apologize for the people in types-discuss who do not subscribe to types-announce for the noise. I don't think there is much to discuss about types-list moderation, as essentially every message is interesting and is accepted.) (Reminder: I am the main moderator of both lists since November 2017 (see the full list of moderators at https://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ), so I was the one filtering almost all announces sent through the list.) The current types-announce policy is roughly: - off-topic announces are not transmitted, everything that seems relevant to type theory, programming language or formal verification is kept (one of those themes has to be of significant importance in the announce, not one checkbox among a bazillion hot topics) - calls for submissions are more important than calls for participations (except in no-submissions events like summer school); only one call-for-participation for conference, and none for workshops, if they have sent a call for submission on the list - position announces are transmitted when they are in-topic (or when they are generic but the sender comes from an in-topic community, implying that the topic will be considered), no judgment on the importance of the position or the announce is attempted. Some numbers. There were 442 postings in 2018, about 2.5 per day. 2200 people receive each types-announce message, and 300 get daily digests. I understand that people prefer to receive less emails. Here are some options I have considered, but currently there is none that I strongly prefer to the statu quo, so the plan is to roughly keep the current policy. 1. I could use a more subjective policy, letting through only announces that pass the filter above *and* that I find interesting. However, based on sampling the archives, this would not remove more than 5-10% of the announces, for a decrease in predictability and fairness. 2. We could stop propagating announcements for positions/jobs, which tend to have a smaller potentially-interested audience than international events. On the other hand, it does seem useful to have a place to publicize positions. This would filter out 10-15% of the announces. 3. We could only send one announce per event, instead of allowing re-sends. I have mixed feelings about this idea. In particular, I think that it is not a good idea to reject announces for deadline extensions: if someone learned of an event from our list, they would probably expect to learn of the extension from our list as well, and they may miss it if we don't propagate it. A lot of the events multi-announce (with at least a month delay in between), so this could decrease the traffic a bit more, maybe 30%. 4. We could restrict announcements of workshops that are affiliated with conferences, systematically asking for joint workshop calls instead of individual calls. We had a lot of traffic for the FLoC 2018 workshops, for example -- for the Calls for Participation, I decided to only let the joint call through. Workshops are 20% of our traffic, but not all of them are co-hosted. 5. I have had discussions with other moderators about splitting the list in smaller, more focused lists, for example one list "types -- and software verification" another "types -- and logic". Personally I think it's pretty clear on which sides most announces would fall, so that someone subscribed to a single of those list could expect a good 40% traffic reduction. But it's not clear how to organize such a transition, and how many people would not still subscribe to both lists. I'm open to other suggestions for filters -- they have to be easily implementable by a human, and justifiable to people whose announces get rejected. It is useful, to evaluate a proposition, to use the list archives ( all 2018 annunces are at http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/pipermail/types-announce/2018/thread.html ) to get a quantitative estimation for how much of the traffic you would filter out. Any other comment on the moderation is also welcome is welcome -- please consider whether you should send it to the whole list or just me. Cheers
