Hi everyone,
At the Valencia dev meeting, in the "take back community channels"[1] session, we discussed how to deal with the somewhat degenerated tor-talk mailing list.
The initial idea was to come up with some excellent, nice and reasonable guidelines and explanations of what should be on tor-talk (and, subsequently, what should be posted someplace else, and where), switch tor-talk to be moderated, and then moderate users for a while until they have shown to agree to the guidelines. Also, step up moderation a bit in the sense that if a user starts to post off-topic things again to warn them, or put them back into moderation.
A less aggressive approach was discussed, which involves the creation of a new list called "tor-users". This new list will not ahve all the thousands(?) of subscribers of tor-talk, which is a shame, but it might be easier to apply a new moderation concept to a new list and sort-of give up the old one, than trying to change the climate on the old list. Also, the idea for the new list was to explicitly have a more narrow focus than the broad "tor-talk" list, namely "(community) user support".
weasel suggested a set of scripts that they used at Debian for some list moderation. It sure sounds great to use IMAP and mail move actions for moderation instead of the mailman interface. It does not necessarily require TPI to officially run an IMAP server; we could use an account someplace else, and even run the scripts outside of TPI if we wanted to.
We did succeed in that we now have a number of volunteers who want to help moderate. (Not enough, please let me know if you want to help, too). I am the unfortunate volunteer that even agreed to "lead" this effort! :-) What we still don't have is a nice and friendly mail that explains the concept and the underlying guidelines, and points to other potential venues (like cpunks maybe) if people want to discuss other things.
Does anyone want to come up with a draft for discussion? I guess ideally we even have a couple of templates to use in mailman for rejection messages, but we can come up with those while we go along. I don't think I should be the one writing it, we have native speakers with better writing skills amongst ourselves :)
Weasel, what's the status of those moderation scripts, and what kind of suggestions do you have on moving that forward? Sorry that I didn't want to talk about it back in Valencia when you wanted to, but I really wasn't in the right mood... Can you dig them up so I can have a look? Do you want to run them on TPI infrastructure? Do you wnt me to run them on mine?
[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2016WinterDevMeet...
-- Moritz