[Asterisk-Users] * INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE ASTERISK COMMUNITY - PLEASE READ NOW *

[Sunrise Ltd]

James H. Thompson wrote:

>I've wondered if a mechanism like this would help:
>For the first N messages you post to the mailing list,
>your post does not automatically get posted.
>Instead you get a message similar to Olle's below,
>ending with something like:
>
>     "If you still want to send your message to
>      the mailing list, just reply to this message"

This might cause more harm than it does good. However, I
can see no harm in sending an auto-reply to each newbie
poster (for the first n messages) that asks something like
"Did you read the rules?" in the subject line containing
'the rules of conduct" for the list in the body, but
without the "reply to confirm your post" thing.

There is also some stuff that could be done automatically
to keep the noise level down. For example ...

- any post to the list with the digest in the subject line
or the digest in the body, should be auto-rejected.

- any post containing any kind of HTML, should be
auto-rejected.

- any post containing with a very low new content to
quotation ratio (ie 20 lines of quotation for a single
line of new content) should have the quotation part
automatically cut to size (ie no more than 5 lines of
quotation per single line of new content apparently
responding to that quotation)

Note: if it is essential that the quotation is left uncut
in the resulting post, the responding poster would have to
use markup to indicate that the quotation should not be
stripped nor cut. For example:

--===[LONG QUOTATION]===---
>
> very long quotation not to be touched by the ML engine
>
--===[/LONG QUOTATION]===---

This would cut down on excessive laziness quoting.

It would also be possible to rate each poster's posting
quality and send the results to the list every week or
month. There is a utility that can be used to assess how
much new content somebody posted and how much quoting
posts contained. The utility is called style and has been
around for ages, since Bell Labs' early Unix releases.

Of course all this requires a bit of work to do and thus
time we all have so little of.

But at the very least the mailing list's mail host should
be configured to reject anything that contains HTML. This
is fairly easy to do and it would go a long distance.

rgds
benjk


--
Sunrise Telephone Systems Ltd
9F Shibuya Daikyo Bldg., 1-13-5 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan

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