RSS Mailing lists. Re: SPAM problems

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From: Richard Clamp
Subject: RSS Mailing lists. Re: SPAM problems
Date: 10:29 on 02 Sep 2003
On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 09:57:52AM +0100, Moran, Matthew wrote:
> JJ asked:
> 
> > How about using Siesta?
> 
> Sounds like a good idea - it's kind of eating our own dogfood in a way,
> using a perl-based list manager.

Sounds exciting.  Oh wait, I spelled excruciating wrong :)

> Or alternatively, as this article suggests:
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/01/2234228&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=
> 126&tid=188&tid=95 we could go to an RSS feed based thing? I know I
> can aggregate RSS feeds into my Livejournal friends list...

And then you can post how, exactly?  (Bonus points if you can not lose
the threading information or turn it into a web forum)

I've actually been half-thinking of this on and off for the past
couple of months, and certainly over the last week as this cursed RSS
lists meme spread.  Unfortunately that means I have to do an
overthought spool out now so I'm crossposting.  Sorry about that.

As far as I can think it through, the RSS thing is for two reasons.
Lazyness and SPAM.  They want to be able to passively read many lists
without bothering to subscribe, but they still want to be able to post
at some point.

Now as often happens, someone will have been doing something very like
that already, and not see the point in this new movement.  For sake of
argument let's call that guy Richard.

Now Richard reads a bunch of mailing lists via nntp, but forced into
his MUA via a simple perl script[0].  When he comes to post he just
replies, and since the lists have good spam detection in front of them
it's allowed through without list membership.  Or, to another list it
might have to go through moderator approval.

Those lists are nntp://nntp.perl.org/perl.* and
nntp://hates-software.com/hates-software.all  Richard is me.

The final piece, once you've accepted that nntp is probably more
convenient than RSS, is stealing the "I don't want to subscribe,
periodically challenge me" idea.  I think that's as simple as two
simple Siesta plugins, if Siesta is your cup of tea.  One to do the
periodic challenging, and the other to parse the response and update
the "confirmed human" table.

As with all overthought things, this peters out at the end.


[0] http://unixbeard.net/svn/richardc/mail/nntp_deliver

-- 
Richard Clamp <richardc@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>

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