Re: Banning annoying users

[Ray Arachelian <sunder@brainlink.com>]

On Tue, 24 Sep 1996, Daniel Miskell wrote:

> The
> not allowing unsubscribed individuals to post is logical, for a time.  But
> that basically outlaws anon remailers that don't allow you to send to an
> account, and a lot of them don't, from my limited understanding.  Besides, if
> we set up the list to ban people who are 'undesirable', instead of just using
> our own killfiles to do the dirty work for the list, then what is to stop
> someone from banning you?  Sure, you move on to another list, but, personally,
> I wouldn't want it done to me, and so I would not do it to someone else.  But,
> like I said, personal killfiles are more than encouraged.  It resolves these
> kinds of conflicts a lot faster and cleaner than debating who and who should
> not be banned.


This is wonderful in theory -- and in practice up until now, but what 
happens when someone decides "Oh, I hate this list and Tim, let me write 
a spam bot to anonymously spam the this into oblivion?"  There is such a 
thing as denial of service via spamming.  It's quite easy to do for 
someone who knows how to run sendmail and knows how to write a shell 
script or a small program.  Hell, I could write one of those in less than 
1 minute.

As for me being banned, I doubt it, I'm not posting daily Tim warnings 
and such spams.  yeah, banning someone off the list for their political 
or even crypto views is silly.  Banning someone for spamming is another 
issue.

There is no reason we can't allow posts from those who are not subscribed 
to the list.  There's also no reason that we can't have someone moderate 
those posts before they make it to the list to remove the spams - mind 
you not to moderate the contents, but to remove repeating annoying spam 
and advertisement.

As for me, I don't personally give a shit, for as long as assholes like 
John Anonymous Mac keeps posting "Tim Warnings" I get more users on my 
filtered cypherpunks list. :)  But it's getting really old.

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