Brad Knowles wrote:
At 4:35 PM -0400 2005-06-24, Barry Warsaw wrote:
Just out of curiosity, what was the reason of the change? Does it drastically decrease the server load or the something else?
I think it's primarily to reduce the workload of the volunteer moderators.
There are occasionally postings to the list that have words like "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the first five lines or so, but which are perfectly valid postings.
And yes, the result is that there should be fewer messages which have to be approved by the moderator volunteers.
In many cases the poster is actively working on a problem and posts the question hoping to get help right away (i.e. in the next hour or so). If the message is held for moderator approval it may not get approved and posted on to the list for several hours, or even a day or two if all owners/moderators are particularly busy that day or it's a weekend and we aren't checking non-essential email as often, etc. So while an occasional administrivia post may get thru due to this change, it also means that on-topic posts that false-positive trigger the administrivia filter will now be sent on to the list in a more timely fashion.
jc (now you have heard from all 3 of us, Barry, Brad, and JC :-)