[Mailman-Developers] UI for Mailman 3.0 update

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Cristóbal Palmer writes:
 > On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 01:03:20PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > > 
 > > The question is "what are they protecting?"  My claim is that if
 > > you're protecting economic resources (bandwidth, accurate counts of
 > > real users) they may be more or less useful.  If it's a security issue
 > > -- including ways of harvesting email addresses that involve
 > > subscribing -- though, you're busted.
 > 
 > To my mind the main resources we're protecting are moderator time and
 > site owner time, and we're admittedly cost shifting onto subscribers
 > for lists where CAPTCHAs are enabled.

I consider that a valid tradeoff, with the breakeven point to be
determined by the moderators/list owners/site owners.

OK, I'm happy again, no crazy people here. :-)

 > But think of it this way: if what mailman does is provide a plugin
 > spot for something external to do CAPTCHA or CAPTCHA-like work, then
 > some non-CAPTCHA method could be inserted that doesn't impose user
 > load.

But IMO the pipeline architecture already does that.  I haven't looked
closely at the Mailman 3 webserver, but my understanding is that it
gets a pipeline too.  It seems to me that once you have that (and IMHO
that is extremely desirable just by analogy to the list processing
pipeline, which I have written several Handlers for), the rest is
going to be pretty CAPTCHA-specific, and quite possibly specific to
the particular CAPTCHA implementation.

It might be worth recommending a third-party implementation of a
best-of-breed (reCAPTCHA?) plugin or even providing one ourselves, but
I plan to leave that decision to Barry, as long as the documentation
for any such feature points out the limitations of the technology.

 > Also, sorry about your stolen bike. :(

Don't be.  It was a $150 bike, and the Minister of Finance in my house
approved purchase of a $670 replacement. :-)  All I really lost was a
junk lock and about $50 resale value.