[Mailman-Developers] Interesting study -- spam on posted addresses...

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 08:52:40AM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> On 2/19/02 7:09 AM, "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
> >> I was wondering how long it would be before someone brought up the case
> >> for Lynx. Blind people I had not though about, although I had thought
> >> about text based reverse turing tests.
> > 
> > :-)
> 
> Lynx access is a really gnarly issue. Lynx usage on my sites has gone from
> about 4% a couple of years ago, to < 1% these days, from what I've seen. On
> the other hand, Lynx is the litmus test for sight-limited access tools. If
> it don't work with lynx, you lock out those with seeing problems (and with a
> mother who has some macular degeneration, I'm a bit enlightened by those
> issues. Thank god for Macs and the ability to make font sizes bigger...)
> 
> While I'll happily tell the "I don't like cookies" people to get over it,

Well, actually, there are still a couple browsers that don't *do*
cookies.  2.8.3, I think, doesn't do persistence, yet.

I'm not sure if GoWeb does or not...

> Lynx access isn't something I can or will easily blow off. And something
> geeks tend not to think of, you start getting into issues of ADA compliance
> issues, which is a non-trivial issue we haven't even started thinking about
> here... 

Was thinking about that, yes.  :-)

> > It's the browser on my wireless handheld, and, in general, it doesn't
> > handle images *at all*.  Nor will the microbrowsers on some people's
> > cell phones.
> 
> Yup. And while I'd say today it's not a huge issue, 2-3 years down the road,
> when the version of mailman we're currently noodging over gets into wide
> usage, it'll be there, and it'll only become more endemic. If you design
> stuff like this for what's Out There today, by the time it's written, it'll
> be missing What's Coming...

My outlook exactly.  I like to try to keep people honest; it ain't
easy.

> >> So one solution would be to have both public and private archives. The
> >> public archives have the email addresses obfuscated in some way, the
> >> private archives would not.
> > 
> > Oh.  We're talking about *archives*?  Silly me.  I thought we were
> > talking about maintainer addresses on sign-up pages.
> 
> We're talking about both, actually. It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!

You got that backwards, Chuq.  :-)

> > It's ASCII text.  It's useful.  Making it into something else makes it
> > less useful, 
> 
> But it's the kind of tradeoff we have to consider -- we ARE going to have to
> give up some stuff in one place to make improvements in another. You aren't
> going to find a way to better protect the admins without cost in usability
> somewhere. It's a no-free-lunch situation, or we would have solved it
> already. The key is to understand the situation and find the most
> appropriate compromise, because a solution without compromise doesn't seem
> to exist. 

Yeah, cost-benefit analyses are hell, ain't they?

The whole topic is probably going to drve us all plaid...

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

   "If you don't have a dream; how're you gonna have a dream come true?"
     -- Captain Sensible, The Damned (from South Pacific's "Happy Talk")