Re: Hardening lists against spam attacks

[John H West <jwest@eskimo.com>]

The idea of distributing tokens by clever and complicated 
schemes seems interesting as a thought-experiment, but I 
wouldn't want to have to study the fine art of "cypherpunk 
posting technique" in order to insert my rare comments into a 
discussion thread.  Charging posting fees is also interesting, 
but as already discussed, has many weaknesses.

An easy solution would be to grant unlimited posting rights to 
anyone with more than one month's membership in the list.  
This idea could be called "the endorsement scheme."

If anyone wishes to make an anonymous post, their submission 
would go into a "general pool" along with all the submissions 
from non-members and people who have subscribed for less than 
one month.  The "general pool" would be a webpage somewhere 
which has on the screen an "Approve" button which would bring 
up a "Username/Passowrd" box.

Anyone with more than three months membership in the list 
could apporove messages from the general pool.  If the senior 
member (_any_ _one_ senior member) feels that a post in the 
general pool is worth sending on to the full list, then the 
message gets general distribution, date- and time-stamped:  

   "Determined by --your_name_here-- (not the author) 
    to be of possible interest to at least one member 
    of the list."  (no problem ... Vulis could still 
    approve his "Huge Cajones Remailer" and his 
    "Suck_My_Big_Juicy_Cock" postings, and none of us 
    will ever figure out where they're coming from)

Senior members would never be in any way reprimanded for any item 
that they forwarded, unless through some "call-for-votes" type of 
action their item-inclusion privileges were curtailed (that'll 
never happen).  No one can "disapprove" or otherwise block any 
message from forwarding to the list.

The principle to be followed for which items to approve would be 
"essentially everything."  The idea is to strive to not block 
postings, but to leave "herbal remedy" ads hanging unendorsed.  
Maybe the unendorsed posts could expire if unendorsed after 72 
hours -- of course, the item would be immediately removed from the 
general pool when it received an endorsement and went to the list.

We have to be careful to not cause any legal liability to fall 
onto an endorser for approving an item (eg, source-code) which is 
later determined to be, eg, an ITAR violation, a copyright 
violation, etc.  The endorsement must have an effective disclaimer.

john