On Sat, 13 Jul 1996, Jeanne Hedge wrote:

I just found out about the new rules today.  WW told me that all new
subscriber's posts go to him, for him to decide when and if to post them.
After some unspecified period of time, he will allow that person to post
things directly to the list.

All of this is in the name of SPAM prevention...

Personally, I don't like SPAM either, but this seems a little extreme.  WW
must have felt that extreme measures needed to be taken.

It doesn't seem all that extreme to me - heck, there are lists out there
that are completely moderated, where every message has to go through the
listowner before getting distributed, no matter how long the poster's been
on.  This is done to lower the noise-to-signal ratio, so that the list can
stay on-topic more, and reduce the repetitive or low-content email to a
minimum.  And the default reply sends messages to both the original sender
and the list, so even if the reply gets rejected, the original writer
still gets the reply.  I have no idea how much White Wolf's more moderate
degree of moderation will help, but I certainly think it's a worthy
attempt to cut down on the noise here.  (As an aside, I think that this
list has glorified noise too much by giving it the name Spam - Spam sounds
vaguely humorous, or at least vaguely acceptable, despite the wider
net.connotations, which themselves aren't really appropriate.  Spam, as
defined for UseNet, is a post that is posted to an overly-large number of
newsgroups.  Noise, which is what we have here, is postings that have
nothing to do with the purpose of the newsgroup or mailing list.  Just a
minor, personal rant.)

--
Scott Johnson |
zagyg@io.com  |        This space intentionally left blank.