RE: [chairs] TC mailing list guidelines

[James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>]

> The only reason I've required subscriptions to these lists is to keep
> the spam out. We're been hit *hard* by bots collecting email addresses
> from our site, and any of the lists that I've opened even for a short
> period of time to non-subscribers gets hit with spam.
>
> I note that you're not volunteering to moderate a public
> comment/discussion list for your TC. Neither am I. If you can find
> someone to moderate it I'll open it up. Otherwise we'll have to require
> subscriptions.

I don't volunteer to moderate by hand, but I do volunteer to help find an 
appropriate technical solution to the spam problem.

I'm told the W3C is planning to solve this problem with a query/response 
system.  The first time somebody sent a message to a comment list, they 
would get a response along the lines of: "You have sent an email to a 
publicly archived W3C list, if this is your intent please send token X to 
the return address to confirm your posting and enable such postings in the 
future." This sounds like a good solution to me.

James