Subject: posting privileges vs receiver-side filtering

From: grenville armitage <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 12:45:13 +1100

It seems we regularly miss some simple points:

Receiver-side filtering:

	- protects the sanity of an individual mailinglist recipient
	 (for their own personal definition of sanity).

Revocation of posting privileges:

	- protects agains dilution of a WG's historical record
	  (archives that soak up all posts to the WG's mailing list)

	- improves the 'signal to distraction' ratio of traffic on the
	  list (particularly important for list residents charged with
	  keeping things on charter and evaluating rough consensus)

Yes, revocation of posting privileges and receiver-side filtering both
cause a drop in traffic reaching one's inbox. But that doesn't 
make the actions equivalent.

cheers,
gja

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From: "Anthony G. Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 05:34:34 +0100

grenville armitage writes:

> - protects agains dilution of a WG's historical record (archives
> that soak up all posts to the WG's mailing list)

Stop blindly archiving every message, and this ceases to be a problem.

> - improves the 'signal to distraction' ratio of traffic on the list
> (particularly important for list residents charged with keeping
> things on charter and evaluating rough consensus)

Distraction is in the eye of the beholder.  Ignoring something
requires no action; paying attention to it requires action.  Thus,
distraction is always an explicit action on the part of the receiver;
it is never forced by the sender.

> make the actions equivalent.

Yes.  The former is censorship, the latter is not.

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 09:22:59 +0100

> Stop blindly archiving every message, and this ceases to be a problem.

The IETF standards process requires us to archive WG mailing lists.
For good reasons: open process requires a public record, and prior art
claims can be checked.

> requires no action;

Not true. When one receives a few hundred emails per day, the act of
ignoring, say, 75% of them takes a significant amount of time. Even
the act of maintaining one's personal filters takes a significant
amount of time.

...
> Yes.  The former is censorship, the latter is not.

It isn't censorship. It isn't infringing anybody's free speech.
It's very specifically restricting misuse of mailing lists that
have been set up for a given purpose. That is well within bounds
for a community such as ours.

     Brian

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From: "Anthony G. Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 16:36:05 +0100

> For good reasons: open process requires a public record, and prior art

How much of an open process can there be if some input is censored?

> ignoring, say, 75% of them takes a significant amount of time.

No, it does not.  I do it.  I know people like to give that impression
so that they can justify censorship, but it just doesn't take that
much time.

> Even the act of maintaining one's personal filters takes a
> significant amount of time.

See above.

> It isn't censorship.

Whenever a third party decides to prevent one party from communicating
with another, it's censorship.

> for a community such as ours.

Unfortunately, there is no objective defintion of misuse, so it
resolves to highly subjective censorship, and often the grounds for
censorship are practically unrelated to real utility or a lack
thereof.

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From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 09:44:12 -0600

Now that we are reaching the stage of "is not"/"is too" discourse, could the 
people who need so desperately to convince each other try private e-mail?

Please feel free to google my own posting history on this list. At one 
point, I thought posting to this list was an effective way to accomplish 
change at the IETF. It's not. If you care, write a draft. If you don't care 
...

Thanks,

Spencer

From: "Anthony G. Atkielski" <[email-masked]>