Re: Standard Headers for Anonymous Remailers

[Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org>]

says Loyd Blankenship:

> 	We've been kicking around the pros and cons of anonymous remailers
> here at io.com. One of the big problems is anonymous bombardment of a 
> helpless newsgroup. This (and the problem of auto-screening anonymous
[...]
> 	Words such as "anon" and "anonymous" might occur naturally in
> the headers. I'd propose something like "ANONYPOST" or "ANONPOST" that 
> isn't likely to occur in nature.
> 	Voluntary adoption of this type of standard by remailers would
> take away some of the ammo that the anti-anon frothers are shooting,
> and would go a long way toward improving the image of remailers in 
> general.
> 
> 	Comments?

Sorry to respond to such an old post, but I can't let this one slip by.
Why not encourage people to be responsible for their OWN mail/news?
Relying on moderators to wipe noses and spank boodies is not going to 
help anyone in the long run.  FidoNet has had a great deal of difficulty
with moderators, and there is no need to spread this problem to UseNet.

The responsibility for you reading or not reading anon posts lies on YOUR
head.  If you do not like them, then learn to use the filtering
capabilities of your software.  If you don't have a news reader that will
do elaborate filters, try strn. 

At any rate, it is my firm opinion that moderation belongs in academic and
hard-science conferences, and those that require a very firmly focussed
range of topics to be of use.  The encouragement of more moderation, and
more moderator "jobs" like filtering out anonymous postings is a very bad
idea, and in particular, the inclusion of special headers for this purpose
will simply suggest to moderators that they filter all such mail by
default, and not even bother to try to determine relative merits.  It's
counterproductive to the entire idea of anonymous posting. 

-- 
DISCLAIMER: This message represents only my OWN opinion, not that of EFF.
Stanton McCandlish    Electronic Frontier Foundation Online Activist
mech@eff.org          NitV-DataCenter BBS SysOp
Fido: <tba>           IndraNet: 369:111/1