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Subject: Spam in ubl-comment mail
Hello ubl-comment subscribers, I imagine that you're about as irritated as I am with the junk that's been coming through on this list. Here's what's happening. For starters, you should understand that (according to OASIS) the spam we've been seeing for the last few months has been coming through the comment form linked from the UBL TC page, not from subscribers to the ubl-comment list. In the beginning of the UBL effort, there was no ubl-dev list for inquiries, so we used the publicly subscribable ubl-comment list for Q&A. OASIS frowned on this practice, and when we started up ubl-dev for Q&A, there was no good reason to try to preserve this function, so I tried per their requests to quash such discussions on the ubl-comment list as they arose. It being nearly impossible to get people to cooperate with this kind of request nowadays, I asked OASIS to simply unsubscribe everyone with the exception of a couple of people the TC would designate to forward genuine comments into the issues list. But I was never successful in getting the OASIS administration to go along with this idea. When some spam started coming into the comment list from people who would subscribe for this purpose, OASIS dealt with the problem not by unsubscribing everyone as originally requested by rather by disabling subscriptions. Unfortunately, disabling the ability to subscribe also disables the ability to unsubscribe. So now that the spammers have figured out how to use the comment form on the TC page for input, we're left with a mail list that has over 300 subscribers, none of whom are supposed to use it for input and none of whom can unsubscribe. I have suggested to OASIS yet again that they implement the original idea of unsubscribing everyone except a couple of designated gatekeepers. So now (having basically no other alternatives) they are actually considering it, but of course that could take a while. In the meantime, however, I am informed (I hope correctly) that you can now unsubscribe from the ubl-comment list and at least get out from under the spam while OASIS figures out what they're going to do. Indeed, if you go down to the bottom of these spam messages (which understandably no one ever does), you will see this line: To unsubscribe, e-mail: ubl-comment-unsubscribe@lists.oasis-open.org This being the case (I hope), I suggest that everyone take advantage of this window of opportunity to unsubscribe *right now* without waiting another couple of years for OASIS to come to this conclusion on their own and before they turn off subscribe/unsubscribe due to some spammer figuring out that subscription has been enabled again. I will stay on the list and promise to forward any non-spam comment we might happen to get. We should probably keep the current document editors subscribed as well, since they are generally the ones who have to make sure that the real comments get disposed of properly. If you try this and find that you can't unsubscribe after all, DO NOT COMPLAIN TO ME OR TO THIS LIST because there is nothing that I or the other members of the list can do about it. Instead, complain to scott.mcgrath@oasis-open.org and ask to be removed from the ubl-comment list manually. If you can in fact unsubscribe but decide that you don't want to because you don't trust me and the editors to properly handle real comments (which appears to be what OASIS is worried about), then go ahead and stay on the list, but if you choose to stay and receive the junk mail, please don't complain about it. And don't reply to anything, whether a real comment or not, because that's not what this list is for; take it to ubl-dev. Jon
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