CLP stats: last 500 posts
Terry Reedy
tjreedy at udel.edu
Sat Dec 10 15:27:24 EST 2016
On 12/10/2016 9:43 AM, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Dec 2016 09:28 pm, Terry Reedy wrote:
>
>>>> The spammer will still be counted,
>>
>> Why reward someone who actively evades defenses? If you want to count
>> spam, it is mostly missing, at least as far as python-list is concerned.
>
> Its not a reward. Spammers are not like trolls, they don't hang around to
> see the result of their posts.
To me, the relevant difference is between posts related to python and
those not. It is usually clear which is which.
> There no evidence at all that this Italian
> spammer is looking for replies or responses to his(?) posts. He apparently
> just fires them out.
>
> I think that it is relevant that comp.lang.python receives X spam messages
> from a certain person. It gives a picture of the health of the newsgroup:
> how much of it is spam? Hopefully only a small amount.
Python-list gets unrelated-to-python spam from lots of people. They are
not outliers (unlike jmf's now blocked trolls), but contaminents from a
different universe.
I agree that the fraction of messages that are clearly spam has some
interest in itself, and definitely should be as small as possible. But I
contend that they should be excluded from a study of the universe of
python-related messages.
My other point is that this small sliver that used to get passed through
is extremely biased and statistically worthless as a study of
python-list spamming. If one wanted to study the rate and nature of
contamination, or the effectiveness of filtering, one would need access
to the raw stream of submissions.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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