[volunteers] Before I clobber that spam from our archive

[Paul Reiber]

The following suggestions are some "thinking outside the box" ideas we
might want to consider.

Please note that I'm wearing my "volunteer hat" not my "president hat"
right now - I.e. these aren't official requests, or setting direction,
or anything like that.

On 12/12/06, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> Let's look at some aspects of that spam that just hit the list:
>
> > To: <web-team at lists.svlug.org>
>
> Hmm, unlike the usual, it wasn't addressed to "webmaster" exactly, but
> rather to the equivalent form that is advertised on the bottom of every
> one of our Web pages.

I'd like to propose that we change the email address on the bottom of
all pages to be  "webmaster at REMOVETHISsvlug.com"
or similar.

I've used this technique before, and yes, there ARE people who've
failed to remove the string REMOVETHIS... and yes, there are probably
people out there coding up automated removal techniques... but it
would work, at least for a while...

[...]
> Which leaves non-programmatic detection.  OK, boys'n'girls, here's what
> we're going to do for a while:  We're going to disable the ability for
> non-subscribed addresses to post directly to this list.

While I'm totally OK with that, we can, if we wish, send webmaster and
web-team email to a new and different list rather than the volunteers
list.  My guess is that we could then allow non-member posts to the
volunteers list while eliminating most of the spam it's been seeing.

Whatever we do, we'll do tomorrow - it's WAY too late - we should all
be asleep already! :-)

-Paul
http://reiber.org