[ale] New Mailing List initiatives for ALE

[Michael B. Trausch]

Jerald Sheets wrote:
> 
> [ale-announce]   (ale-announce at ale.org <mailto:ale-announce at ale.org>)
> This list is moderated and posting is restricted. The sole purpose of
> this mailing list is to make announcements to the entire membership of
> [ale] members about upcoming [ale] events. Any other postings (including
> announcements from other organizations) belong in the [ale] list.
> 

I think that this would be a good idea; for one, it gives us a reliable
way to look for announcements that we can flag via a filter as more
important as other messages via whatever mechanism we choose.

> 
> [ale]  (ale at ale.org <mailto:ale at ale.org>)
[snip]
>
> However, a post regarding war in Iraq, how global warming is Bush's
> fault, and he caused hurricane Katrina to oust poor minorities from
> their homes in New orleans so they can no longer vote as a block against
> Republican interests so Republicans can continue to prepare a "new world
> order" mindset to make it easier for the aliens to take over when they
> invade...  Unacceptable for this list, and will be draconianly and
> unceremoniously moderated.  (i.e. never see the light of day) 
> 

Moderation may not be a bad thing, but I have left many a moderated list
for lack of a moderator, or the unilateral decisions that moderators
have made, or any number of other issues.

I wonder how hard it would be to create a meta-moderation system for the
list, where everyone can exercise their "say" towards a given
author/poster for an e-mail message, and configure thresholds for that.
 I do not have much experience using Mailman, so I do not know if
something like this could be done or not easily, but let's say that a
new alias were to be created (like ale-meta mod or something) that would
be handled by a computer program.  It could keep track of people
forwarding messages to it with something like +1 or -1 or whatever in
the subject line.  If a particular person gets too many (say, 70% of the
list or some other threshold) negative responses in too short of a
time-window, their messages would start hitting a moderator queue, or be
blocked entirely.

The downside to this is that not all of us would really have the time to
contribute to such a "ratings" system fairly.  I know that I barely have
time to read all of the posts on the mailing list with all of the things
that I wind up doing in a day, so I am not even sure how I would be with
regard to using such a meta moderation system.  Also, I can see that
there might be a tendency to only use the system negatively; this isn't
/. with millions of readers, and so there would not really be the
resources (though, I could be wrong) for all of us to spend time saying
"person A is good, person B is bad" to the system.  The downside that
comes from that is that if someone has a "bad day" and gets shifted to
the moderation queue, it is likely to push them to leave or further
throw icing on that bad day.  So, it is not without its issues; but it
would be, at least IMHO, better than single-person moderation.

Also, it might be worthwhile to use some sort of content filtering on
the main list; if it would be possible to give the software some
intelligence in managing it.  Maybe something like a scoring system so
that a message with a single occurrence of the word "bush" would get
through (say, someone has in their e-mail signature "One bird in the
hand is worth two in the bush" or something) would get through, and
maybe subtract one point, whereas a message with an occurrence of "Bush"
would subtract, say, 5 points.  Or "Clinton," or "\bGeorge.*Bush\b" or
something, so that certain "hot-button" issues can be quashed early on.
 However, I am not sure about the amount of false-positives that a
system like that might bring up, either.

> 
> [ale-chat]  (ale-chat at ale.org <mailto:ale-chat at ale.org>)
> This is a new mailing list for random thoughts and babbles to/for/about
> [ale] members. This list is unmoderated for members of [ale] to post to
> and subscribe to. This list is where you should post if you believe that
> the topic does not really pertain to everyone and anyone on the list. In
> fact, this list is probably best used as an [ale] BBS, except that any
> member may subscribe to this list and receive the messages in real time
> instead of reading them from the web ... if that is what you want. 
> Translation:  anything goes!  Just as today's [ale] list exists,
> [ale-chat] will exist.  Membership will be encouraged to engage in more
> technical discourse on [ale], but [ale-chat] will remain free and
> unfettered for all the pinging, ponging, and politics it can handle.
> 

Maybe ale-ot would be a better name, so as to make clear (particularly
to newer users that might be coming into the group) that the main ALE
list has content rules.

Just my two cents, anyway.  :-)

	- Mike

-- 
"Fate: Protects fools, children, and ships called /Enterprise/."
                               -- William T. Riker, ST:TNG, "Contagion"


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