I wrote:

> 5. Web forums have poor presence in Web search prominence and archives
> like Wayback Machine / Internet Archive. (In fairness and in contrast,
> crowdsourced knowledgebase sites like StackExchange are uncommonly good
> in those areas.)

Particular relevance of this is that, along with the recurring problem
of Web archives suddenly getting blown away or disappearing, it's
relevant to the experienced computerist's judgement of 'Why should I
participate in _this_ Internet place?' My impression is that many feel
as I do, that I'd rather participate in a place where my postings will
reach many people (including via search results) over a long period of
time. Hence, a mailing list with high search prominence and a long
expected lifetime is (all other things being equal) a better use for my
time and trouble.

Quoting Miroslav Rovis (miro.rovis@???):

> Rick's analysis is superb. And I couldn't even try if I wanted to, for
> insufficient resources (referring to my aptitude), and for lack of time, to
> reply up to his standards.

My goodness, thank you.

> But some of the arguments given apply, in different manner, to mailing lists.

I'll use this opportunity to comment a bit further.

> E.g.: try visit: https://gmane.org/
> Type Devuan in the search box. You will likely still get only:
[snip]

But fortunately GMane is hardly the only way to find Internet
information, and dyne.org's mailing lists are well indexed by search
engines and widely archived.

Some additional things I forgot to include:

1. A mailing list subscriber can have extremely fine control over local
presentation, e.g., I have a ~/.mailcap entry that prevents me from
being shown garish HTML. Controlling a Web forum's presentation locally
is a much more difficult problem, addressable if at all using Web
stylesheets and Greasemonkey scripts.

2. I said in an aside to Steve Litt that he should please hold the
thought about 'rising to complain about debian-user', but then never got
back to that. I've heard Steve and others bitterly complain about being
stifled there by Debian's listadmins, seemingly one of several
motivations for establishment of Dng. (I've never been a debian-user
subscriber; on rare occasions, I've browsed the Pipermail archives.)

So, yes, examples can be cited of mailing lists enacting oppressive
'regimes of active moderation and retromoderation'. This is relatively
rare, and part of the reason for that is: Remedies (metaphorically,
safety valves) exist. A typical mailing list displays in postings and
the archives the provided names and real e-mail addresses of
participants. If the mailing list configuration permts, subscribers
also have access to the subscriber roster. Therefore, subscribers
can do out-of-band discussion about the administrative regime, and can
speak with, and be spoken to by, anyone who has been ejected or muzzled.
Therefore, an oppressive mailing list administrative regime cannot
easily prevent visibility into, and scrutiny of, its practices, (Signs
of attempting to do so are also easy to notice: private mailing list
achive not visible to the public, subscriber roster visible to
listadmins only, listadmin names/real e-mails not revealed only 'role'
addresses, etc.) And the ultimate safety valve always beckons: A large
subset of the subscribers saying 'Sod this for a lark' and moving to a
different mailing list elsewhere.

None of that is true, typically, of Web forums, where by design you do
not by default even know the other subscribers' e-mail addresses and in
most cases you know only a site-specific 'handle' useless for finding
that person out-of-band.

A Web forum is thus, relatively speaking, like a water-monopoly empire
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire) that cannot be defeated
or reformed from within because its central control cannot be evaded.
But with mailing lists, there are remedies.


> What I liked best in his (future?; pls give us the link once it's done)
> [future] FAQ is:
> > regimes of active moderation and retromoderation are much more common,

Some day, I would like to write a 'listadmin best practices' article,
because I've learned a great deal as a listadmin (and site operator) for
dozens of mailing lists for LUGs and for volunteer organisations over
some decades since the 1990s (majordomo days!). One guiding principle
I've adopted is based on one of Larry Wall's virtues for programmers:
'A smart listadmin is a lazy listadmin.'

A great deal follows from that, including always seeking to impose the
smallest possible amount of listadmin social control, because that is
always ongoing work, and for little benefit. Also, when you must
sanction a user, it becomes advisable to use the _absolute minimum force_,
not because that's nicer so much as because it simply works better.

Some listadmin do otherwise (apply what I regard as hypercontrol) for,
I'm sure, a variety of reasons that they find compelling and I won't
say they're always wrong. (We'd have to discuss particular cases.)
I *will* say that they are wrong in every case I've seen. ;->

Example: In 2003, the mailing lists operated by Linux User Group of
Davis (California, 200km from me) aka LUGOD were subject to
hidden-from-ubscribers severe hypercontrol by the listadmin, one Peter
Salzman, who developed a pattern over covertly putting many subscribers
on moderated status, and covertly banning others with no accountability
to LUGOD's membership -- without their knowledge or even the knowledge
of the club president. (Salzman's actions had the neat implication that
he made both victims and all critics vanish.)

So, I quietly put up a Web page documenting Saltzman's practices:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/lugod.html

Because my Web site has very high search prominence and also because it
hosts the main technical calendar for the San Francisco Bay Area
('BALE', Bay Area Linux Events), people at LUGOD started noticing
despite Salzman's efforts to make everything invisible. In December
2003, he was replaced as listadmin, and his practices came to an end,
though I left my page up as I'm a fan of personal accountability.[1]

In September 2004, I received a very strange undated letter
purporting to be from LUGOD, semi-threatening libel litigation:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/kendrick-letter
I inquired about its bona fides, as much about this seemed irregular:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/kendrick-letter-reply

Alleged letter sender Bill Kendrick responded saying that the letter had
been contemplated at one point but that LUGOD had decided _not_ to send
it. His successor as LUGOD President, Emily Stumpf, chimed in calling
the mailing 'accidental', and claimed that the (unspecified) 'issues'
raised by my page had been judged to not exist(?). Taking seriously the
(total bullshit, really) allegation of 'libel', I twice stressed that I
would be glad to correct any substantive inaccuracies, requiring only
that someone state what on the page is incorrect and why -- and received
no reply. (Obvious conclusion: phony, baseless threat)

To recap, destructive hypercontrol among listadmins is real in rare
cases, but even in extreme cases like Salzman's, there are effective
remedies.


3. When I had mailing list administration for Silicon Valley Linux
Group (SVLUG) suddenly thrown in my lap around 2007, I stumbled on a
surprisingly effective way to gracefully manage an entire class of
group-political problems, which I'll describe here.

SVLUG had been very fractious for quite a few years, especially after
it haplessly elected as President a belligerent alcoholic who nearly
destroyed the group before his resignation just ahead of removal by
referendum, about a year later. With the departure of most core
volunteers, I found myself listadmin and lead sysadmin. With the
new President's approval, I pruned greatly the confusing mass of posted
rules, and they ended up with the statement of intent I cited before...

SVLUGs' listadmins normally intervene only to ensure lists' technical
operation, to halt spam (incontrovertible spam, not postings someone
merely dislikes), and to halt major eruptions of offtopic spew.
Enforcement if any should always be minimal and public. (We don't do
backroom politics, and our preferred means of social control is to help
everyone apply his/her own well-tuned killfile.)

...on http://www.svlug.org/policies/list-policy.php, plus one or two
rules specific to particular mailing lists documented on their listinfo
pages, notably the Jobs one: http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/jobs

In the spirit of the intent statement, I adopted a very light touch for
handling problems. Despite resolution of the alcoholic-president
problem, there remained the unfortunate tact that the main mailing list
had attracted a group of about a half-dozen trolls who habitually abused
SVLUG's large audience with deliberate flamewars and attempts to provoke
overreaction by (and public argument with) listadmins. I dealt with
this by anticipating the ploys and carefully not giving them what they
wanted. E.g., if I warned them on the main mailing list (the one with
the largest audience) that they had been excessively offtopic for too
long on an obnoxious thread, they attempted to escalate by arguing back
and adding a cross-post to other SVLUG mailing lists. Rather than
argue, I simply added Mailman spam filters (Privacy Options, Spam
Filters) to make Mailman autoreject further attempts at those crossposts
-- and added disclosure of this fact to
http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/svlug .

One further refinement was particularly effective. Alongside the main
'svlug' mailing list with the large audience, there exists public (and
publicly archived) mailing list 'Volunteers' that was intended to be
where the small group of core volunteers coordinated running SVLUG.
My refinement was that, on the rare occasion where I had to warn or
otherwise sanction a subscriber, I would at most allude briefly to this
fact on the main mailing list, and say it would be covered on
Volunteers. All subsequent discussion with the subscriber would be CC'd
to Volunteers, such that it was 100% on the public record but without a
large audience. All the administrative noise got moved -off- the main
mailing list but with 100% visibiility nonetheless.

Over the years since 2007, I twice placed two subscribers briefly on
moderated status for a pre-disclosed two week period. (One was posting
conspiracy-theory politics about Egypt. (Accidental cutting of
one of Egypt's main undersea cables at the port of Alexandria was a CIA
plot, blah blah.) I cannot remember what the other did. My mention to
them of their restricted status went to them CC'd to Volunteers saying
when it would end, and I did the same with a followup message two week
laster saying the restriction was lifted.

One further person in summer 2016 inspired the same treatment, one
Michael C. Robinson of Washington state[1], who gratuitously posted
Christian-evangelical religion-tinged political advocacy for a certain
bilious, orange-tinged USA demagogue, former slumlord, and failed
casino owner. At first, I said Robinson would be on moderated status and
that his attempts to post would not be approved unless/until he sent an
apology to Volunteers by a certain date (about two weeks away), and if
he failed to do so he would be banned.

When that date arrived, I changed my mind because I saw no need to ban
him, on reflection. Instead, I said he was _not_ being banned, but
would have no ability to post until he posted the required apology to
Volunteers. If he never apologised, his inability to post could last
until the heat death of the universe as far as I was concerned, but that
I was peacefully removing the problem of his treatment from SVLUG's
agenda by leaving any resolution in his hands. I stressed that he would
be given absolute freedom to discuss this matter on Volunteers, just not
on the main forum (with its large audience).

As I expected, he never apologised, although he kept occasionally
attempting to post to the main mailing list, being a slow learner.
About a week ago, he finally unsubscribed from the main list.
(Remarkably, he's still subscribed to Volunteers.)

To recap, my serendipitous discovery was that a small-audience but still
fully _public_ administrative mailing list makes an excellent place to
discuss matters of subscriber sanctions/warnings, getting that
administrivia and its flame potential off the main mailing list forum.
(I considered it fair play to mention on the main list that listadmin
intervention with a subscriber was underway and would be fully disclosed
on Volunteers.)

So, I offer that as a creative solution to the problem of being
effective as a listadmin, getting the administrative noise away from the
affected main discussion forums, and at the same time achieving extreme
transparency and accountability to the subscribers. And I can also say
that restraint on my part, carefully doing absolutely minimal responses
to problems, has been good policy.



[1] http://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/ntsb/aircraft-accident-reports/AAR69-08.pdf
on page 11:

'In the case of Pan American, two bulletins were sent to two
documentation groups, one in Miami and the other in New Yorks. [...]
One of the engineers within the applicable section reviewed the bulletin
and made a determination of the necessity for compliance after
coordination with any other interested section, i.e., flight operations,
maintenance. Some of the factors considered during this review were the
number of times the company aircraft was exposed to the condition
specified in the service bulletin and the relationship of this exposure
to safety. If the determination was to comply with the bulletin and the
cost was generally under $500, as it was in this instance, an aircraft
modification request would be prepared. [...]

In respect to the processing of the subject Service Bulletin No. 2384,
(less than $500 cost), the initial routing was made and the bulletin was
reviewed by the operations engineering group. One of the supervisors of
an engineering section within this group decided, after coordination
with flight operations, that the bulletin was not applicable to Pan
American aircraft and no further action was taken. The reason for this
decision was not fully documented.'

No record exists of the _names_ of the engineer and supervisor who
decided to ignore this fix even though they had carte-blanche permission
to authorise and expense fixes under $500. So, a $5M aircraft was
destroyed and everyone died, including Pan American Airways Captain
Arthur Moen, who was my father until his death 59.2 seconds after
applying takeoff thrust for his final flight.

Thus, it would seem, my fondness for accountability by name.


[2] Named here and elsewhere as I did for Pete Salzman, because, well,
see other footnote.