suse-security-readers,
I have received the last responses to my request for comments about a
moderation of this list by the end of the week before last week. Here are
the results of what I've read:
91 people have stated their opinion,
where 49 were against moderation and 30 wanted moderation. The rest
commented the idea with productive critizism, thereby covering much
more than I thought of in the beginning ("What if..."-cases.).
The most frequent reasons to vote for a moderation were noise reduction
and focussing on the actual subject of the list, thereby minimizing
friction that appears if information is posted redundantly. Only one
person mentioned spam, but I believe the whole rest considers this
self-evident.
The most frequent reasons against a moderation were the drastically
increased latency of the list. Even if somebody is online who can approve
postings in an average time of 30 minutes, the latency is very high, and
contributors might watch themselves writing beautiful answers that were
redundant because another posting got through before. (Besides, the
personnel question on behalf of SuSE wasn't resolved yet, too.) I wouldn't
be able to tell how much time would pass until a posting gets approved on
weekends.
I take it as a compliment that nobody worried about censorship. :-)
Sometimes traffic gets more, and it reduces again after a while. Spam
was not an issue lately. We've seen very productive postings as well as
meaningless comments on the list. Reading the less informative postings is
a very fast thing to do once you're used to it: "D".
If there aren't any very serious complaints, I'd like to postpone the
question about moderation. Maybe we can discuss it again some time in
spring 2001. In the meanwhile I hope that the suse-security list will
continue (and even improve) to be as informative and productive as it is
right now.
Thank you all for the responses,
Roman.
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| Roman Drahtmüller