Note: the basic info of the below feature request has been posted here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1394592&group_id=103&atid=350103
I received an weird but interesting weird email the other day that got me thinking about moderation of GNU mailing lists. Here's a paraphrase the email:
To: Moderator Slacker Subject: Bug-slacker-project post from xxx@gnu.org requires approval
As list administrator, your authorization is requested ... [you know rest] [mail message] Dear Slacker:
We've rather belatedly realized that a you've been ignoring the moderation messages of your mailing list which now has hundreds or thousands of held messages and/or a whole lot of spam in the archives.
If you would like to volunteer to take out the trash for this or *any* of the 25 or so lists mentioned below, please email me.
Although somehow I don't think there are going to be too many takers of this fabulous offer, the email does have I think one useful idea in it. Basically for any slacker-moderated list, it's probably okay to let just about anyone do the moderation. After all, just about any human can easily detect spam from legitimate posts.
As someone who's been doing GPL projects for a long time, things have been getting tougher. In the good old days, one gave an email address for support and the email address was used for support on the project. Nowadays the email address is used to send viruses, spam and phishing requests, and to use as the return address for viruses, and spam to others. Okay. So now this moderation thing on mailing lists was then added. That then gave the person offering support the additional burden to act as a trash man for the list (in addition to his/her own personal increased spam/viruses).
The thing that always struck me as wrong about moderated lists is that for the convenience of the poster --- and often this is someone who is a novice asking for help (and sometimes in a not even in a very respectful way) -- burden is usually put on the people who might be able to help. I think of this as the N to one burden problem: a little burden (by not having to register to post) is reduced on N people (often novices), at the expense of adding N times extra burden on the "moderator(s)" (someone who is often an expert and is 1 in number). It strikes me as a poor use of the expert's time. Actually, I'm probably not the only one who feels that way, hence the result cited above.
So it might be nice to have a box or flag for such a mailing list that allows anyone who is registered in the mailing list have the pleasure of doing email moderation.
I suppose this could be subject for abuse too (discard valid posts and accept spam), but I have a feeling that to first order approximaton this would be a big help. And doesn't mailman already have ways of watching users or moderators, and revoking moderation by the administrator or whatnot?
Thanks for considering this.