Re: Spam and conference announcements

* Graham Klyne <gk@ninebynine.org> [2004-07-08 09:39+0100]
> 
> I'm getting a little bored with the amount of spam that is arriving in the 
> form of conference announcements, especially the carelessly-sent multiple 
> copies that so often arrive (complete with meaningless apology that serves 
> to show the senders know what they're doing).
> 
> It's maybe justifiable if the conference is relebvant to the list topic, 
> but today there were two announcements that had no discernable relevance to 
> the Semantic Web.

I've previously wondered (and discussed with a few folks) ways of making
this more cost-effective for all concerned. Relevant ingredients include
RSS, (rdf-)icalendar, XSLT etc. There are a number of sites around that 
focus on aggregating and re-presenting event descriptions. Given the 
largeish (*) number of public discussion lists W3C hosts, it would be
good to think about ways of providing a global view of event
announcements, improved targetting to relevant communities, etc. Then we
could say things like "If you're announcing a conference, here's how to
do it" rather than just "please stop spamming us...".

My previous notes on this topic are in the ESW Wiki at 
http://esw.w3.org/topic/AnnounceOMatic although the project sketched
there didn't really take off.  

> Time for a policy review?

Policy what policy? :( 

We don't really have much except the usual platitudes about keeping
things on topic, not sending obvious-spam, etc. I could put a few words
in http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/interest/ that folks could cite when 
annoyed by offtopic conference announcements. I don't want to set myself
up as a content filter for such things though. Hmm...

Dan


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Received on Thursday, 8 July 2004 05:50:39 UTC