In article <80hcks$18u$1 at pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>,
James Bonfield <jkb at mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>>It was moderated for a while, by Tim Littlejohn. However even then the
>moderation did not work. Judging by the fact that I'm sure Tim
>wouldn't have deliberately forwarded any spam he received in email on
>to the list, I have to conclude that the bionet setup was such that
>emails to the mailing list were sent to the moderator, but postings to
>the newsgroup are not.
>>Newsgroups can have moderator status, but everyone and his dog knows
>how to bypass that, so ultimately there's little that can be done.
>>I suggest that the easiest way to improve signal to noise ratio is to go
>to a pure mailing list only, or maybe to have a web hosted discussion
>board.
>>Of course the other way to improve signal to noise ratios is to
>generate more signal... :-)
In general, I prefer newsgroups to mailing lists, because even though
there's a lot of spam, my newsreader enables me to skip most of it.
If we are to move to a mailing list, can we please have it run GNU
Mailman, which is far more capable and easier to use for subscribers
than traditional list servers like majordomo. Mailman allows you to
adjust your subscription over the WWW, rather than having to remember
how to compose specially formatted e-mail messages.
I run a couple of mailing lists on a Mailman server operated by a
friend of mine, and it's very nice indeed. Although I would be willing
to administer such a list, I don't think we can use that particular
machine, since it is not likely to be around forever. If someone can
persuade their local sysadmin to set mailman up and create the list, I
will be more than happy to be the list owner and administer it (the list
owner does not have to have an account on the machine running the list
server).
Tim.