Moderator mailbox overflow

[Manfred Geiler <ma...@gmail.com>]

Hi all,
Since our mailing list traffic is growing from day to day we are also
facing more and more moderator mails. As you all (hopefully! ;-) know
our lists are both "subcribers only" which is documented on our
homepage. Every email from a non-subscriber is held for moderation.
There are two kinds of users affected:
 * New users who either have not read the "subcribers only" hint or
catched our list adresses somewhere else. (Don't know where they would
expect the answer. Personally? Not very nice community thinking...)
 * Old users who changed their emails and forget to (re)subscribe or
users who sporadically use an alternative adress (e.g. web mail)

Now comes my question (or better: cry for help ;-)
Does anybody have ideas how we can manage this in the future? Back
from a 5(!) days vacation since yesterday I still have 20 moderator
mails of such kind waiting for confirmation. (Not mentioning the 50
spam mails which I can drop easily but have to open each though)
I am afraid of beeing absent longer!  :-)

Until now I handled those mails in a friendly manner. Which means,
that I accepted those mails and at the same time sent a kind
"subcribers only" reminder to the sender. Since MyFaces moderation
should not be my full time job I do not want to handle it that way any
longer. Someone might say: that's ok, bad luck for the ignorant. But:
I see a problem for (at least) all gmail users. Gmail has the feature
of hiding duplicate mails, so you never see your own mail coming back
from the list. Which is fantastic in most cases, of course. But for
the mentioned cases gmail users never will be aware of their mail
beeing stuck, they would just wonder why nobody answers.

What do you think? How do other projects handle this? Any ideas?
Periodically send reminders on the lists?
Better noticeable hint on the homepage?

Thanks,
Manfred

Re: Moderator mailbox overflow

[Martin Marinschek <ma...@gmail.com>]

Another thing we have already discussed was:

* Help us documenting MyFaces - add documentation at 
http://wiki.apache.org/myfaces 
* or even better: send us patches for the files contained under 
current/forrest/content/xdocs to update the homepage (ATTENTION: install and 
run forrest on the content before sending in these patches)

regards,

Martin

On 8/10/05, Manfred Geiler <ma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Another bad habit I noticed:
> Many people answer to a Jira notification directly instead of adding a
> new comment.
> 
> +1 for a weekly or biweekly list rules mail
> 
> Let's do some brainstorming:
> 
> * subscribe before you post
> * don't forget to subscribe with your alternative (web-)mail address
> * as an alternative send an "allow request" for your secondary mail
> address to the list moderator (= owner?)
> * do not answer Jira watch notifications directly, add a comment in
> Jira directly instead
> * mind the difference between users@ and dev@ ("MyFaces users help
> users" vs. "MyFaces developers and committers discussions")
> * do not send spam :-)
> 
> More ideas?
> Regarding "allow requests": Is there a way to directly contact the
> moderators of a list? mailinglist-owner@example.org doesn't seem to
> work for our lists.
> 
> And: Can some native speaker (re)phrase this in real English please? ;-)
> 
> Thanks,
> Manfred
> 
> 
> 
> 2005/8/9, Martin Marinschek <ma...@gmail.com>:
> > My opinion: there is no solution to this except that you just delete all 
> of
> > these messages.
> >
> > We could add a weekly mail, were such things are denoted, so that people
> > keep in mind that their email might not reach us.
> >
> > Of course, we could just track down these spammers and do them bodily 
> harm
> > ;)
> >
> > regards,
> >
> > Martin
> >
> > On 8/9/05, Manfred Geiler <ma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 2005/8/9, Craig McClanahan <cr...@gmail.com>:
> > > > Two other scenarios I have seen for moderator queue messages:
> > > >
> > > > * People who subscribe on one address and post occasionally on 
> another.
> > > > (The moderator can deal with this issue once by specifically
> > > > allowing postings from the alternate address, even though it's not
> > subscribed).
> > >
> > > Yes, sure. But this is even more cumbersome, because you have to
> > > recognize people who use two email adresses --> Moderator mailbox
> > > overflow vs. Brain memory overflow :-)
> > >
> > >
> > > > * New committers, whose SVN-originated messages will need to be
> > > > specifcially "allowed" in this fashion.
> > >
> > > Yes, they are easy. Fortunately the number of committers is ending ;-)
> > >
> > > -Manfred
> > >
> >
> >
>

Re: Moderator mailbox overflow

[Manfred Geiler <ma...@gmail.com>]

Another bad habit I noticed:
Many people answer to a Jira notification directly instead of adding a
new comment.

+1 for a weekly or biweekly list rules mail

Let's do some brainstorming:

* subscribe before you post
* don't forget to subscribe with your alternative (web-)mail address
* as an alternative send an "allow request" for your secondary mail
address to the list moderator (= owner?)
* do not answer Jira watch notifications directly, add a comment in
Jira directly instead
* mind the difference between users@ and dev@ ("MyFaces users help
users" vs. "MyFaces developers and committers discussions")
* do not send spam  :-)

More ideas?
Regarding "allow requests": Is there a way to directly contact the
moderators of a list? mailinglist-owner@example.org doesn't seem to
work for our lists.

And: Can some native speaker (re)phrase this in real English please? ;-)

Thanks,
Manfred



2005/8/9, Martin Marinschek <ma...@gmail.com>:
> My opinion: there is no solution to this except that you just delete all of
> these messages.
>  
>  We could add a weekly mail, were such things are denoted, so that people
> keep in mind that their email might not reach us.
>  
>  Of course, we could just track down these spammers and do them bodily harm
> ;)
>  
>  regards,
>  
>  Martin
> 
> On 8/9/05, Manfred Geiler <ma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2005/8/9, Craig McClanahan <cr...@gmail.com>:
> > > Two other scenarios I have seen for moderator queue messages:
> > >
> > > * People who subscribe on one address and post occasionally on another. 
> > >   (The moderator can deal with this issue once by specifically
> > > allowing postings from the alternate address, even though it's not
> subscribed).
> > 
> > Yes, sure. But this is even more cumbersome, because you have to 
> > recognize people who use two email adresses --> Moderator mailbox
> > overflow  vs.  Brain memory overflow  :-)
> > 
> > 
> > > * New committers, whose SVN-originated messages will need to be
> > >   specifcially "allowed" in this fashion. 
> > 
> > Yes, they are easy. Fortunately the number of committers is ending  ;-)
> > 
> > -Manfred
> > 
> 
>

Re: Moderator mailbox overflow

[Martin Marinschek <ma...@gmail.com>]

My opinion: there is no solution to this except that you just delete all of 
these messages.

We could add a weekly mail, were such things are denoted, so that people 
keep in mind that their email might not reach us.

Of course, we could just track down these spammers and do them bodily harm 
;)

regards,

Martin

On 8/9/05, Manfred Geiler <ma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 2005/8/9, Craig McClanahan <cr...@gmail.com>:
> > Two other scenarios I have seen for moderator queue messages:
> >
> > * People who subscribe on one address and post occasionally on another.
> > (The moderator can deal with this issue once by specifically
> > allowing postings from the alternate address, even though it's not 
> subscribed).
> 
> Yes, sure. But this is even more cumbersome, because you have to
> recognize people who use two email adresses --> Moderator mailbox
> overflow vs. Brain memory overflow :-)
> 
> 
> > * New committers, whose SVN-originated messages will need to be
> > specifcially "allowed" in this fashion.
> 
> Yes, they are easy. Fortunately the number of committers is ending ;-)
> 
> -Manfred
>

Re: Moderator mailbox overflow

[Manfred Geiler <ma...@gmail.com>]

2005/8/9, Craig McClanahan <cr...@gmail.com>:
> Two other scenarios I have seen for moderator queue messages:
> 
> * People who subscribe on one address and post occasionally on another.
>   (The moderator can deal with this issue once by specifically
> allowing postings from the alternate address, even though it's not subscribed).

Yes, sure. But this is even more cumbersome, because you have to
recognize people who use two email adresses --> Moderator mailbox
overflow  vs.  Brain memory overflow  :-)


> * New committers, whose SVN-originated messages will need to be
>   specifcially "allowed" in this fashion.

Yes, they are easy. Fortunately the number of committers is ending  ;-)

-Manfred

Re: Moderator mailbox overflow

[Craig McClanahan <cr...@gmail.com>]

On 8/9/05, Sean Schofield <se...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd be interested to hear how other projects handle this as well.  I
> certainly agree with you that you should not be stuck moderating all
> of these emails.
> 

I follow the same pattern you do when moderating commons-dev ...
although I'm not always as diligent about sending the reminder back to
the poster.  One thing that can help is to have more than one
moderator, so that messages don't get hung up for days when the
moderator is offline for a while (and they actually expire after a few
days anyway).  The downside, of course, is that *both* moderators get
to go through all the spam :-(.  I'm guessing there's 50 a day or so
of those -- fortunately, dealing with them (once you know what it is)
is zero-effort.

> Is unsubscribed user the only reason why you would get an email in
> your moderator queue?  If so I think its approrpiate to automatically
> send an email back to the user letting them know they are not
> subscribed, etc.  This should work for gmail users as well.
> 

Two other scenarios I have seen for moderator queue messages:

* People who subscribe on one address and post occasionally on another.
  (The moderator can deal with this issue once by specifically
allowing postings from
  the alternate address, even though it's not subscribed).

* New committers, whose SVN-originated messages will need to be
  specifcially "allowed" in this fashion.

Craig

> sean
> 
> On 8/9/05, Manfred Geiler <ma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > Since our mailing list traffic is growing from day to day we are also
> > facing more and more moderator mails. As you all (hopefully! ;-) know
> > our lists are both "subcribers only" which is documented on our
> > homepage. Every email from a non-subscriber is held for moderation.
> > There are two kinds of users affected:
> >  * New users who either have not read the "subcribers only" hint or
> > catched our list adresses somewhere else. (Don't know where they would
> > expect the answer. Personally? Not very nice community thinking...)
> >  * Old users who changed their emails and forget to (re)subscribe or
> > users who sporadically use an alternative adress (e.g. web mail)
> >
> > Now comes my question (or better: cry for help ;-)
> > Does anybody have ideas how we can manage this in the future? Back
> > from a 5(!) days vacation since yesterday I still have 20 moderator
> > mails of such kind waiting for confirmation. (Not mentioning the 50
> > spam mails which I can drop easily but have to open each though)
> > I am afraid of beeing absent longer!  :-)
> >
> > Until now I handled those mails in a friendly manner. Which means,
> > that I accepted those mails and at the same time sent a kind
> > "subcribers only" reminder to the sender. Since MyFaces moderation
> > should not be my full time job I do not want to handle it that way any
> > longer. Someone might say: that's ok, bad luck for the ignorant. But:
> > I see a problem for (at least) all gmail users. Gmail has the feature
> > of hiding duplicate mails, so you never see your own mail coming back
> > from the list. Which is fantastic in most cases, of course. But for
> > the mentioned cases gmail users never will be aware of their mail
> > beeing stuck, they would just wonder why nobody answers.
> >
> > What do you think? How do other projects handle this? Any ideas?
> > Periodically send reminders on the lists?
> > Better noticeable hint on the homepage?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Manfred
> >
>

Re: Moderator mailbox overflow

[Sean Schofield <se...@gmail.com>]

I'd be interested to hear how other projects handle this as well.  I
certainly agree with you that you should not be stuck moderating all
of these emails.

Is unsubscribed user the only reason why you would get an email in
your moderator queue?  If so I think its approrpiate to automatically
send an email back to the user letting them know they are not
subscribed, etc.  This should work for gmail users as well.

sean

On 8/9/05, Manfred Geiler <ma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> Since our mailing list traffic is growing from day to day we are also
> facing more and more moderator mails. As you all (hopefully! ;-) know
> our lists are both "subcribers only" which is documented on our
> homepage. Every email from a non-subscriber is held for moderation.
> There are two kinds of users affected:
>  * New users who either have not read the "subcribers only" hint or
> catched our list adresses somewhere else. (Don't know where they would
> expect the answer. Personally? Not very nice community thinking...)
>  * Old users who changed their emails and forget to (re)subscribe or
> users who sporadically use an alternative adress (e.g. web mail)
> 
> Now comes my question (or better: cry for help ;-)
> Does anybody have ideas how we can manage this in the future? Back
> from a 5(!) days vacation since yesterday I still have 20 moderator
> mails of such kind waiting for confirmation. (Not mentioning the 50
> spam mails which I can drop easily but have to open each though)
> I am afraid of beeing absent longer!  :-)
> 
> Until now I handled those mails in a friendly manner. Which means,
> that I accepted those mails and at the same time sent a kind
> "subcribers only" reminder to the sender. Since MyFaces moderation
> should not be my full time job I do not want to handle it that way any
> longer. Someone might say: that's ok, bad luck for the ignorant. But:
> I see a problem for (at least) all gmail users. Gmail has the feature
> of hiding duplicate mails, so you never see your own mail coming back
> from the list. Which is fantastic in most cases, of course. But for
> the mentioned cases gmail users never will be aware of their mail
> beeing stuck, they would just wonder why nobody answers.
> 
> What do you think? How do other projects handle this? Any ideas?
> Periodically send reminders on the lists?
> Better noticeable hint on the homepage?
> 
> Thanks,
> Manfred
>