Readers of Debian-project

This is a quiet reminder that debian-project and all Debian mailing lists are governed by the mailing lists code of conduct and the main Debian code of conduct.

* Please be considerate of each other: assume good faith and treat each other
with the respect that each of us deserves.

* People can make unintentioned mistakes: we're all human. Pointing out that
a mistake has been made need not be a finger-pointing exercise or an excuse
for a large number of emails.

* It shouldn't need twenty people to make a point or start arguments and
counter arguments. If someone has already written what you would have wanted
to write, that's fine: in many cases you can safely leave it there.
The list is moderated: the volunteers moderating the list and everyone
reading the list will appreciate you for not providing more to read through.

With thanks: the Community Team have recently put together some thoughts
and considerations expanding on the Code of Conduct and giving some examples
that may be useful.
https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct_interpretation

With every good wish, as ever,

Andy Cater

[On behalf of the Debian Community Team]

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"Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> writes:

...

* It shouldn't need twenty people to make a point or start arguments and
counter arguments. If someone has already written what you would have wanted
to write, that's fine: in many cases you can safely leave it there.
The list is moderated: the volunteers moderating the list and everyone
reading the list will appreciate you for not providing more to read through.

I'm a little concerned that this mention of moderation could give the impression that we're filtering messages based on tone or content.

Unless I've misunderstood completely, we do not judge the content of the messages, except that we filter out very obviously abusive trolling that
the list was suffering prior to moderation, and obviously drop SPAM/Phishing/etc. if we see it.

As one of the moderators, I occasionally get the chance to
approve/reject messages (on the rare occasions when the other moderators
don't beat me to it).

I've only rejected a handful of messages, and they were almost all
obvious SPAM, and IIRC one trolling attempt from a throw-away address,
not otherwise involved in the discussion.

Cheers, Phil.
--
|)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY

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On Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 09:09:20AM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:

"Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> writes:

...

* It shouldn't need twenty people to make a point or start arguments and
counter arguments. If someone has already written what you would have wanted
to write, that's fine: in many cases you can safely leave it there.
The list is moderated: the volunteers moderating the list and everyone
reading the list will appreciate you for not providing more to read through.

I'm a little concerned that this mention of moderation could give the >impression that we're filtering messages based on tone or content.

Unless I've misunderstood completely, we do not judge the content of the >messages, except that we filter out very obviously abusive trolling that
the list was suffering prior to moderation, and obviously drop >SPAM/Phishing/etc. if we see it.

Agreed, that's exactly the policy. It just takes more time to check
more messages, and I think that's all that Andy was suggesting.

--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com "When C++ is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb." -- Steven M. Haflich

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Hello,

Le Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 11:54:02AM +0000, Steve McIntyre a écrit :

On Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 09:09:20AM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:

Unless I've misunderstood completely, we do not judge the content of the >messages, except that we filter out very obviously abusive trolling that >the list was suffering prior to moderation, and obviously drop >SPAM/Phishing/etc. if we see it.

Agreed, that's exactly the policy. It just takes more time to check
more messages, and I think that's all that Andy was suggesting.

How about we make that a feature and introduce a delay of a couple of
hours between all messages in threads like this one ?

Have a nice week-end,

Charles

--
Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan
Debian Med packaging team http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tooting from work, https://mastodon.technology/@charles_plessy Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy

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On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 08:10:39AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:

Hello,

Le Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 11:54:02AM +0000, Steve McIntyre a écrit :

On Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 09:09:20AM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:

Unless I've misunderstood completely, we do not judge the content of the >messages, except that we filter out very obviously abusive trolling that >the list was suffering prior to moderation, and obviously drop >SPAM/Phishing/etc. if we see it.

Agreed, that's exactly the policy. It just takes more time to check
more messages, and I think that's all that Andy was suggesting.

How about we make that a feature and introduce a delay of a couple of
hours between all messages in threads like this one ?

This sounds seducing. What I don't like about it is that it is somewhat manipulative.

Cheers & nice week-end too :)
--
t

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Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info> writes:

Hi Phil,

I've only rejected a handful of messages, and they were almost all
obvious SPAM, and IIRC one trolling attempt from a throw-away address,
not otherwise involved in the discussion.

Obviously my emails have been considered spam or my email a throw-away
one, since from my last 4 emails to d-p not a single one has arrived.

Reality seems to be very different from what you and Steve have written.

Well, that's odd, because I cannot find a single instance of a mail from
you being discarded, but perhaps I don't have a full set of data, or my
notmuch search foo is weak?

Here's the full set of data that I have:

phil@rummy:~$ notmuch count --output=threads 'thread:"{to:debian-project and subject:APPROVE}"'
1346
phil@rummy:~$ notmuch count --output=threads 'thread:"{to:debian-project and (subject:DISCARD or subject:REJECT)}"'
276

These include a mention of your name (which in this case includes the
From: because it's quoted in the body of the approval mail)

phil@rummy:~$ notmuch count --output=threads 'thread:"{to:debian-project and subject:APPROVE}"' norbert
32
phil@rummy:~$ notmuch count --output=threads 'thread:"{to:debian-project and (subject:DISCARD or subject:REJECT)}"' norbert

0

and as a control, let's prove that this can provide results:

phil@rummy:~$ notmuch count --output=threads 'thread:"{to:debian-project and subject:APPROVE}"' joerg
12
phil@rummy:~$ notmuch count --output=threads 'thread:"{to:debian-project and (subject:DISCARD or subject:REJECT)}"' joerg
1

Which looks to me as though we've had 1346 messages though moderation
since it started (they all get sent out initially with 'APPROVE' in the subject, so that search also catches things that were rejected in the
end), of which 276 were discarded/rejected.

In that period, you seem to have sent 32 messages, none of which have I
seen a rejection/discard reply for.

I suppose there would also be the possibility that none of the
moderators replied at all, but looking at all the moderation mails that
match 'norbert', each thread includes at least 2 messages, so at least
one moderator has replied to each.

If you tell me message-IDs for the missing messages, I can have a hunt
for them if you like.

Cheers, Phil.
--
|)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY

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On Sat, 2022-03-26 at 11:18 +0100, Philip Hands wrote:

Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info> writes:

Obviously my emails have been considered spam or my email a throw-away
one, since from my last 4 emails to d-p not a single one has arrived.

Reality seems to be very different from what you and Steve have
written.

Well, that's odd, because I cannot find a single instance of a mail
from you being discarded, but perhaps I don't have a full set of
data, or my notmuch search foo is weak?

If the mail is a false-positive for the spam filter on lists.d.o then
you would not see it this way. One would have to contact listmaster
with date and message-id.

Ansgar

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Hi,

(adding listmaster to Cc: as I don't know how flexible our mailing list software would be)

On Sat, Mar 26, 2022, at 00:10, Charles Plessy wrote:

How about we make that a feature and introduce a delay of a couple of
hours between all messages in threads like this one ?

The OSM foundation seems to have a feature in its mailing list software, where, in contentious situations (e.g. during board elections campaigning periods), posters are throttled to one message every 24 hours.

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2021-December/008248.html

At the time, it seemed to me like an interesting idea that we could be experimenting with to keep flamewars somewhat more contained.

Cheers,
--
Nicolas Dandrimont

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--
-Brian

On Fri, 2022-03-25 at 09:09 +0100, Philip Hands wrote:

"Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> writes:

...

* It shouldn't need twenty people to make a point or start
arguments and
  counter arguments. If someone has already written what you would
have wanted
  to write, that's fine: in many cases you can safely leave it
there.
  The list is moderated: the volunteers moderating the list and
everyone
  reading the list will appreciate you for not providing more to
read through.

I'm a little concerned that this mention of moderation could give the impression that we're filtering messages based on tone or content.

Unless I've misunderstood completely, we do not judge the content of
the
messages, except that we filter out very obviously abusive trolling
that
the list was suffering prior to moderation, and obviously drop SPAM/Phishing/etc. if we see it.

The biggest problem of moderating troll post

Hi,

(adding listmaster to Cc: as I don't know how flexible our mailing list software would be)

On Sat, Mar 26, 2022, at 00:10, Charles Plessy wrote:

How about we make that a feature and introduce a delay of a couple of
hours between all messages in threads like this one ?

The OSM foundation seems to have a feature in its mailing list software, where, in contentious situations (e.g. during board elections campaigning periods), posters are throttled to one message every 24 hours.

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2021-December/008248.html

At the time, it seemed to me like an interesting idea that we could be experimenting with to keep flamewars somewhat more contained.

You are a bit too late, we have such a system for one or two decades. We can throttle mails down
based on everything procmail can choose. We usually do this from time to time to throttle down
threads based on subject.

Alex


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On Sat, Mar 26, 2022, at 15:43, Alexander Wirt wrote:

Hi,

(adding listmaster to Cc: as I don't know how flexible our mailing list software would be)

The OSM foundation seems to have a feature in its mailing list software, where, in contentious situations (e.g. during board elections campaigning periods), posters are throttled to one message every 24 hours.

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2021-December/008248.html

At the time, it seemed to me like an interesting idea that we could be experimenting with to keep flamewars somewhat more contained.

You are a bit too late, we have such a system for one or two decades.

Thanks for pointing it out, this is useful to know. Is this documented somewhere
that I c/should have found ?

We can throttle mails down based on everything procmail can choose. We usually
do this from time to time to throttle down threads based on subject.

Ack. I must admit I've stopped being familiar with procmail for a while. Could you confirm that enacting a limit of 1 message per sender per day on a given mailing list (or thread) would be doable without too much extra development?

Is this something that you would consider doing if the Community Team, or DAM, or other members of the project, were to ask for it?

Thanks again for your work as listmaster,
--
Nicolas Dandrimont

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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Brian Thompson <brt9023@gmail.com> writes:

The biggest problem of moderating troll posts is that the definition of trolling varies broadly across individuals.

Agreed, and the moderation of debian-project is very sensitive to that.
We're addressing this by erring on the side of approval and only rejecting
the messages where there's essentially unanimous agreement. In practice,
this has only been spam (95% of what's been rejected), direct and obvious personal attacks along the lines of the reason why we put the moderation
in place originally, and a very small handful of messages that were so incoherent and off-topic that we couldn't make heads or tails of them (and
were probably actually spam).

This is all done somewhat ad hoc since we don't have moderation software
that lets us implement this more mechanically, but in practice it seems to
have worked.

I have also checked all messages to the moderation queue since March 11th
and can't find any messages from Norbert, so whatever is going on there
seems to be happening upstream of moderation.

--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

...

I have also checked all messages to the moderation queue since March 11th
and can't find any messages from Norbert, so whatever is going on there
seems to be happening upstream of moderation.

His mail was both to me and the list. I didn't notice this and replied
assuming that I was seeing his mail via the list, rather than the one
that arrived direct to me.

It turns out that he's been barred from debian-project for some time, apparently, so people on the list will have seen only my reply.

Of course, if he's blocked, the mails won't get through, and they will
also never get as far as being moderated, so that explains everything.

I presume he was told about the block.

[I'm Bcc-ing this to him to ensure that he definitely knows now]

Sorry to everyone for any confusion arising from me replying onto the
list -- I hope at least that the stats were faintly interesting.

Cheers, Phil.
--
|)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY

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