[spambayes-dev] require subscription?

[Skip Montanaro]

    Tony> Requiring registration for spambayes at python.org would break the
    Tony> ability to automatically submit a problem report that sb_server
    Tony> offers (and Outlook may offer in the future).  I don't have the
    Tony> data, but I suspect that a great many of the people that report
    Tony> bugs on spambayes at python.org are not subscribers, and they are the
    Tony> people that need help (and many of them would probably find
    Tony> subscribing difficult, given that what else they find difficult),
    Tony> and we need to know where the bugs are to try and fix them.

Agreed.  I find it irritating as hell that if I have the every once in
awhile problem with some tool that I have to go through the
subscribe/confirm dance before I can ask "I upgraded foo on my bar platform,
now it doesn't work, why?".

    Tony> In addition, there are different levels of response to a
    Tony> non-member posting: accept (as now), hold, reject, discard.  Are
    Tony> you advocating hold or reject?  If it's hold, then that means that
    Tony> someone (the way it's set up now, Tim, TimS, or Barry) needs to go
    Tony> through the held messages and approve/reject them.  I doubt any of
    Tony> those people have the time or inclination to do that.  

I do it for several other lists.  It's not an overwhelming job (I have a
mailman front-end script I use to condense the review page), but it would be
much more difficult for spambayes since the list isn't filtered.

    >> I don't feel that the Mailman subscribe/confirmation process would
    >> really scare anybody away,

    Tony> I do.

"scare" is maybe not the right verb.  I think most people are too busy to
bother subscribing just to ask a question.

Skip