NEW CYPHERPUNKS LIST (was Re: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up")

[Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>]

I wish people would give subject fields which stand out to posts of
significant interest, other wise they tend to get lost in the noise.
(I have corrected this :-)

Sten Drescher <stend@sten.tivoli.com> writes:
> >>>>> John Gilmore writes:
> 
> JG> Sandy has agreed to continue moderation through the end of the
> JG> original 1-month experiment (through Feb 19).  And it's a good
> JG> thing, too, because the "cypherpunks community" had better get off
> JG> its whining butt in the next ten days, or it will no longer exist.
> 
> [...]
> 
> JG> This is a "put up or shut up" to the cypherpunks community.
> 
> 	This appears to be as good a time as any to announce that I'm
> "putting up".  I've already taken steps, along with Jim Choate, to
> start a network of majordomos hosting a Cypherpunks mailing list.  I
> didn't intend to announce this until Jim and I had gotten the first
> pair of 'domos working properly, but this means that we'll need to
> speed things up.  Our intention is to have a set of majordomos which
> are intersubscribed to a cypherpunks list on each one, with measures
> taken to ensure that mail loops don't develop.  
>
> 	John, I'd appreciate your permission to use your Cypherpunks
> welcome message as the basis for the welcome message of this new list.
> Also, while we will make every effort to have this new list available
> for subscriptions by Feb 20, I'd appreciate it if you could consider
> making the current list available for a short period longer if we
> encounter unanticipated difficulties.

First, thanks for your efforts!  (I had just spent a couple of hours
putting together a web page, and collecting information to organise
something, but you beat me to it.)  As I have spent some time on it,
I'll contribute what I had planned:

As a stop gap measure you could create a standard majordomo at the
beefiest of your 'domo hosts.

Or you could create a quick 'n dirty mail exploder, by taking the
current subscribers, and putting 100 mail addresses in a .forward file
at each <mail-exploder@domo.host>, and having the central 'domo with
an initial subscription list all the mail-exploders, plus all those
who subscribe afterwards.

Buys use some time to get to iron out the wrinkles in the distributed
list scheme.

As a simpler alternative to the mutually subscribed majordomo's you
might consider using mail-exploders for the final solution: set up
mail exploders which soley forward posts to subscribers (ie do not
accept posts).  The mail-exploder would be an appropriately
configured/modified majordomo itself.  Have a central majordomo which
accepts incoming posts, and forwards them to the mail-exploders.  The
central 'domo would also forward subscribe/unsubscribe to a random/the
correct(or all) majordomos.

Final comment: perhaps you've investigated this, but what Perry
Metzger has for the majordomo running cryptography@c2.net is excellent
at stopping people forging subscribe and unsubscribe messages.

The output looks like this:

: To: A.Back@exeter.ac.uk
: From: Majordomo@c2.net
: Subject: Confirmation for subscribe cryptography
: 
: Someone (possibly you) has requested that your email address be added
: to or deleted from the mailing list "cryptography@c2.net".
: 
: If you really want this action to be taken, please send the following
: commands (exactly as shown) back to "Majordomo@c2.net":
: 
:         auth abcd1234 subscribe cryptography A.Back@exeter.ac.uk
: 
: If you do not want to this action taken, just ignore this message and
: no action will be taken.

And would really cut down the nuisance of people subscribing others
without their knowledge.

Once, again thanks muchly for your's and Jim Ravage's efforts,

Adam
--
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