[ILUG] Restict posting to ILUG to members only?

[Colm Buckley]

Seán Mac Suibhne wrote:

> Is it possible to restict posting to ILUG to members only?

As has been already pointed out, this was proposed at the last AGM,  
and defeated by a large majority.

Some background; it has been discussed several times on the list  
(most commonly at the outbreak of some new spam or virus variant),  
and each time there has been a broad consensus against.

The main reason for maintaining the list's "open" status is that it  
has been widely publicised as the place to go for Linux answers.  The  
message we've been pushing hard for years is "you have a Linux  
question, post it to ilug at linux.ie".  I am not inclined to put any  
sort of additional barrier in place to people posting their Linux  
questions to the list.

Regarding spam and virus trapping; I have a fairly comprehensive set  
of filters in place.  Firstly, the mail server uses greylisting; mail  
is not allowed to the list unless the sending mail server retries at  
least 180 seconds after the first attempt.  Pretty much all genuine  
email systems will do this, but most spammers don't.  Secondly, email  
is filtered through both spamassassin and clamav antivirus filters.   
Thirdly, any non-text attachments will cause the email to be  
rejected.  These measures are catching upwards of 98% of all unwanted  
content to the list with an acceptably-low false-positive rate.

> So are the membership ok with kind of content we got this morning?   
> I'm not.  Its an excellent example of why members only should be  
> able to post.

Sure, the occasional bad'un does get through.  It's part of the price  
we pay for a largely-unregulated Internet.  I don't view it as a  
particular inconvenience to hit the "Junk" button a couple of times  
each day, and despite the regular Daily Mail-style huffing and  
puffing which emerges, I don't believe that many other people do  
either.  Think hard about return on effort here; how much hardship is  
it *really* to put up with a few spams?

CP Hennessy wrote:

> Maybe a reasonable compromise is for unsubscribed posters to be  
> moderated?  Even if the moderator was only able to moderate once or  
> twice a day, the delay would be a small price to pay for "clean"  
> lists.

I disagree.  Firstly, you introduce a human dependency into a process  
which is otherwise automatic.  Remember that a post to ILUG will  
often be a new Linux user's first introduction to the community; this  
process should be painless.

The short answer, for those who prefer BOFHisms.  "No."

     Colm

-- 
Colm Buckley / colm at tuatha.org / +353 87 2469146