Re: "Finding" www-html (was: Flash)

On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 12:15:42AM -0500, Arjun Ray wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Dan Connolly wrote:
> > How did you find out about www-html? I suspect there's some
> > misleading documentation, and I'd like to get it fixed.
> 
> That's a sharp guess, IMHO:)
> 
> I think a lot of these people got subscribed "automatically" by some
> supposedly "value-added" online help service.  For instance, C|NET is
> known to play itself as one by automatically posting their readers'
> questions to usenet.  
> 
> The trouble is, this kind of bogosity really can't be fixed.  All it
> takes is a web-site with some traffic to say "hey, www-html is a great
> place to ask your newbie questions! Click here to subscribe!".  And
> there's no saying that there aren't thousands of these all over the
> web.

One way to solve this problem is to put new subscribers on a
read-only list for the first n weeks or posts, and if they try
to post something off-topic, politely redirect them elsewhere.

Our list software doesn't have that facility built in right now,
but I would like to add it (one day... maybe.)

In the meantime I could probably do something like that manually
without too much effort. Maybe I'll try that soon.

I already reject a fair bit of off-topic mail from non-subscribers.
My current semi-autoresponse is attached; feedback welcome.

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny       <gerald@w3.org>  +1 613 261 6630
System Administrator   http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)      http://www.w3.org/