[antlr-interest] Re: much ado about nothing

lgcraymer lgc at mail1.jpl.nasa.gov
Tue Dec 9 13:40:59 PST 2003


I see limited amounts of unsolicited email spam--that's a side effect of working at a place in the .gov domain.  Misuse of federal 
equipment is a prosecutable offense, and complaints about spam are followed up; usually a warning is sufficient.  (I wish that worked 
for virus-laden emails from infected sources, but ...).  Most spam is not intentionally malicious--it is a form of advertising.  If you take 
no action to discourage unwanted advertising, you are seen by the advertisers as tacitly approving receipt of the material.  If you put 
up barriers which force the advertisers to demonstrate intent to abuse the system, they are likely to back off.

I disagree with the view that
> > Moderation on membership is useless as they will simply use john.smith
> > as a username and we'll be none the wiser.
because I believe that the spammers have the good sense not to leave themselves open to legal action--or even being banned from 
yahoo.  The converse is more likely to be true:  if you don't moderate, then you intentionally invite spam.  I was especially amused by 
the "I'm a nude model" (msg #10267) post which was apparently response to Ter's anti-moderation message (10266).  [No, I do not 
think that that was coincidence--I suspect that this is an active advertising campaign on the part of eroticy.com with human-in-the-loop 
posting, not a spambot.]  BTW, how about a test of the hypothesis that "moderation is useless":  if you can get a spammer to take 
demonstrably abusive action (get past the new user moderation in a trial period through use of an inocuous user name and initial post) 
and yahoo does not take action in response to a complaint about that action, then I'll accept the "moderation is useless" argument as 
valid.

--Loring

--- In antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com, "Matthew Ford" <Matthew.Ford at f...> wrote:
> I agree.
> 
> I use very effective spam filtering (only about 10 in 2000/week get
> through) but I let all this list through and just trash the obvious spam
> without even opening it, so I have not seen the messages people are
> referring to.  It is usually obvious from the subject line which ones are
> spam.
> 
> matthew
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Terence Parr" <parrt at c...>
> To: <antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 6:51 AM
> Subject: [antlr-interest] much ado about nothing
> 
> 
> > Moderation on membership is useless as they will simply use john.smith
> > as a username and we'll be none the wiser.
> >
> > Moderation on each message is very unsatisfactory as we'd need perhaps
> > 3 moderators in perhaps 4 equidistant timezones to get decent response
> > time on each posting.
> >
> > Do you really want to add that work load given how much spam you get in
> > your regular mailbox?  A trivial word filter on this list would be
> > sufficient for all spam since you are not getting your regular personal
> > email in this folder.  You're going to add a big load to remove 2 or 3
> > spam a day?
> >
> > I truly don't see how the antlr-list problem is different than your
> > regular spam problem.
> >
> > Ter
> > --
> > Professor Comp. Sci., University of San Francisco
> > Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator, http://www.antlr.org
> > Co-founder, http://www.jguru.com
> > Co-founder, http://www.knowspam.net enjoy email again!
> > Co-founder, http://www.peerscope.com pure link sharing
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
> >
> >


 

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