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[squeak-dev] [Help] Announcements List Moderators Needed

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Ken Causey-3

[squeak-dev] [Help] Announcements List Moderators Needed

Do you have 15-30 minutes per week you can spare? Have you been
observing this community for a while and have gained a strong mental map
of names of community participants and projects? If so then we need
you.

The Announcements list is a major spam magnet. Just as a rough guess I
would say we receive on the order of 1000 spam per each valid
submission. The list is fully moderated and to keep up with this volume
of spam the list has to be moderated regularly.

If you accepted this job you would:

1. Start receiving far more spam in the form of announcements list
moderation requests. The spam would be in the form of attachment to
each request and the emails themselves have a standard format, so would
be easy to filter out.

2. Carefully look through the announcement moderation requests at each
opportunity (hopefully at least once a day) looking for valid
submissions. Realistically you can just scan the subjects which include
the email address of the submitter. In all likelihood you will
recognize an email address for a valid submission and then look at the
message itself to confirm.

All list moderators would get all messages and so missing one is no
great problem as one of the other moderators would probably catch it.
If you find a valid submission you would login to the moderation
interface (web-based) and search for and accept only that submission,
leaving the rest of the moderation queue.

3. Once or twice a week (schedule to be determined and depends on
number of volunteers) you would scan through the entire moderation queue
for valid messages. In this case the easiest information to spot is the
subject and so you would be looking for names of projects and relevant
keywords. Mark each valid submission (if any) and then submit the
entire moderation queue having all the spam deleted automatically.

This is a largely thankless and annoying job. Very few announcements
are sent to the announcements list yet. I wish I knew why and what to
do about it. All I know to do at this point is be patient, and I'm
asking you to assist me in this and cut down on the volume of messages I
have to scan.

Thank you,

Ken Causey

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Rob Rothwell

Re: [squeak-dev] [Help] Announcements List Moderators Needed

Ken,

You made the thankless task sound so inviting...

Well, someone has finally asked for something that I MIGHT be able to help with. I wouldn't say I have a "STRONG mental map" though. Am I even watching the right lists? I suspect that the 15-30 minutes you mention may need to be expanded if I am not completely familiar with what is going on...

So...I'd like to say I'll give it a shot. I do have business guests coming from out of town to work on a project for the first 3 weeks of December, so I guess that would be as good a time as any to see if I touch it during times of increased workload!

I won't be near a computer until Monday the first due to Thanksgiving travel, but I read your plea, and having been an Airborne Ranger Medic for nearly 8 years, I felt a kinship to you and your thankless, annoying, and no doubt boring and tedious task.

I suppose it's the least I could do for all the help and feedback I have received from the community. But what if I can't keep up???!!!

Take care,

Rob

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Ken Causey <[hidden email]> wrote:

Do you have 15-30 minutes per week you can spare? Have you been
observing this community for a while and have gained a strong mental map
of names of community participants and projects? If so then we need
you.

The Announcements list is a major spam magnet. Just as a rough guess I
would say we receive on the order of 1000 spam per each valid
submission. The list is fully moderated and to keep up with this volume
of spam the list has to be moderated regularly.

If you accepted this job you would:

1. Start receiving far more spam in the form of announcements list
moderation requests. The spam would be in the form of attachment to
each request and the emails themselves have a standard format, so would
be easy to filter out.

2. Carefully look through the announcement moderation requests at each
opportunity (hopefully at least once a day) looking for valid
submissions. Realistically you can just scan the subjects which include
the email address of the submitter. In all likelihood you will
recognize an email address for a valid submission and then look at the
message itself to confirm.

All list moderators would get all messages and so missing one is no
great problem as one of the other moderators would probably catch it.
If you find a valid submission you would login to the moderation
interface (web-based) and search for and accept only that submission,
leaving the rest of the moderation queue.

3. Once or twice a week (schedule to be determined and depends on
number of volunteers) you would scan through the entire moderation queue
for valid messages. In this case the easiest information to spot is the
subject and so you would be looking for names of projects and relevant
keywords. Mark each valid submission (if any) and then submit the
entire moderation queue having all the spam deleted automatically.

This is a largely thankless and annoying job. Very few announcements
are sent to the announcements list yet. I wish I knew why and what to
do about it. All I know to do at this point is be patient, and I'm
asking you to assist me in this and cut down on the volume of messages I
have to scan.

Thank you,

Ken Causey