[Wolves] Forums/mailing lists

[s parkes]

>From: Peter Oliver <p.d.oliver@mavit.freeserve.co.uk>
>To recap, forums have been set up on our website, and someone was going to
>gateway them to mailing lists.
>
>Now, as I understand it, a consensus was reached on Wednesday to dispose
>of the forums.  We will, instead, rely purely on mailing lists, hacking
>the associated web-based archives so as to provide posting capabilities.
Won't somebody think of the spam!  I get one little tummy bug and the world 
starts to go crazy on me ;-) and my doctors assure me it's not me that's 
crazy and I have the certificate to prove it ;-)

How are we going to control what gets passed onto the mailing list to stop 
it becomming a free for all?

May I suggest placing a human filter between the web posting and the mailing 
list?

The message could be sent to a random three volunteers from a pool of us to 
'sponsor' the message and allow it through onto the list.  This way spam 
should never find it's way onto the list and the signal to noise ratio stays 
at the same pretty poor level it has now ;-) with no further degredation.

The messages could be sent to the random three (three means it gets three 
times the chance of being seen by eyes in a timely manner) with a url the 
sponsor clicks on the url and fills either a reason why the message was 
disallowed (obvious spam, a link to an easy to find faq with the answer etc) 
or allows the message to the list with a message this messages has been 
sponsored by 'blah' thanks for helping, or someother gubbins.

this way newbies and transients get all the help they require, spam is 
killed at source (with or without the pee off spammer scum message), and the 
noise is kept to friendly banter and not the kinds of crap that have killed 
some good list and newsgroups in the past.

There are hundreds of scripts that could be hacked into phpnuke to do the 
job but it's only a hundred or so lines of code (with all the nicities like 
comments and security added) so I think we could get it done ourselves.

I know the human filter idea will have it's knockers but if anyone can come 
up with a fool proof (and I have access to fools to prove it) filter that 
forfils the criteria I would love to see it.  BTW > /dev/null does not fill 
all the criteria, just the bozo filter one ;-)

just my £0.02 on the idea but I think the lack of a bozo filter could be 
detremental to the list.
>
>I had an idea today (http://nntp.x.perl.org/group/ should take the
>credit).  We could also set up a news server on our box, hosting just our
>own groups.  Mailman has an option to gateway its lists to newsgroups.
>This would provide a means of accessing the lists that some of us might
>find more convinient.  It'd also give us another angle of attack on the
>web-forums problem -- there may well be web based news front-ends.  When I
>get time I'll have a search and report back.
>
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Usenet_Gateway/

has got 7 php scripts that should take around 20 mins each to hack into a 
phpnuke module.

BUT are we sure that this is a solution, it seems we are replacing forums 
that are a pain in the rear end to keep up with, with a news service that 
might just be exactly the same at the end of the day.  I think the mailing 
list idea has some mileage if we can control the content of mails passed to 
the list.

sparkes

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