From: Ben Giddings Date: 2003-10-01T05:32:32+09:00 Subject: Re: [OT] Suggestions: Addition to FAQ, 'anti-spam trouble tickets' Josef 'Jupp' Schugt wrote: > What about adding this to the FAQ of the group so that one can simply > refer to it if necessary? Here's a draft (both English and German): > > - ------------------------------------------------------------------- > How to react to trolls and spam? > > Do not react at all or at least keep your reactions off-list - > including complaints about spam and trolls. It's hard enough to train > a spam filter without people replying to and quoting spam and troll > messages. I think it's a good idea to have a FAQ entry saying not to feed the trolls, but I don't think this is the right answer. I think if you're training a Bayesian filter, you need to give it the tough cases too, so that it knows to distinguish between spam and ham. I also think that some spam/troll discussion is necessary even if it is just "I think this message is spam/a troll because of X, Y, Z so don't reply to it". It would also be useful to mention that because the list is public and is mirrored from Usenet there are subtleties that people don't seem to understand: 1) Crossposting frequently occurs on Usenet. Messages which may show up in your inbox may in fact be usenet messages posted to 10 groups. This is surely not a message you should reply to. This also explains a lot of not-on-topic messages which you might see. 2) If you have any suspicion that a message may be spam or a troll, here are some ways to check: * Does the email address / return address look valid? * Can you spot multiple newsgroups in the header which shouldn't be there? * Do a quick google / google news search on the name and see if he/she is a known troll * Is the content of the message either completely unrelated to Ruby or very inflamatory? 3) Some typical trolls and troll subjects to watch out for are: * Which is better, Ruby or _______ * Ruby sucks, here's why * Which is the best language for _________ <- typically cross-posted to 20 newsgroups 4) If a potential spam or troll message offends you, you're probably not alone. While it may be tempting to respond, unless you really think your message will be appreciated by a large number of people on the list, resist the temptation. As for the idea of an off-topic Ruby mailing list... I don't think that would be worthwhile. If 1 in 20 messages on the list is off-topic, but marked as such, I don't mind, and my threshold for on-topicness is pretty high. I think limited discussions of programming in general, even if it isn't Ruby-specific is useful here since it broadens everybody's horizons. I also don't mind the occasional joking reply to an on-topic post... if the list were just "How do I do X in ruby" and answers to that, it would become pretty dry and limited. As long as the subjects seem to do a pretty accurate job of reflecting the content of the message it is an easy matter to skip over uninteresting ones. Ben