* META: Fix the signup procedure? @ 2021-08-11 11:26 Russell VT 2021-08-11 11:36 ` Brian S. Wilson ` (2 more replies) 0 siblings, 3 replies; 9+ messages in thread From: Russell VT @ 2021-08-11 11:26 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cygwin List Admins - Can one of you powerful folks, please, fix the signup approvals and make it a bit more difficult to signup and account that is "allowed" to post on this list? Generally, it's at least an email verification loop. But, maybe it's time to induce an "age" as well? That said, I will concede that it unfairly targets those folks who need legitimate help, for a current or new problem that may have escaped regression checks, or general tool obscurity. Regards, Russell VT grey beard -- Russell M. Van Tassell <russellvt@gmail.com> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: META: Fix the signup procedure? 2021-08-11 11:26 META: Fix the signup procedure? Russell VT @ 2021-08-11 11:36 ` Brian S. Wilson 2021-08-11 12:15 ` Russell VT 2021-08-12 5:24 ` Christopher Faylor 2021-08-12 10:36 ` Valerio Messina 2 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread From: Brian S. Wilson @ 2021-08-11 11:36 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cygwin [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 952 bytes --] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Can one of you powerful folks, please, fix the signup approvals and make it > a bit more difficult to signup and account that is "allowed" to post on > this list? > > Generally, it's at least an email verification loop. But, maybe it's time > to induce an "age" as well? As a long time user I would oppose an "age" related test to invalidate emails. Long time users are less likely to be spammers than new email sign ups. That said, it does seem that we are getting quite a bit of spam from the Cygwin email list and it would be nice if something along the lines of email verification could be done to prevent this. > That said, I will concede that it unfairly > targets those folks who need legitimate help, for a current or new problem > that may have escaped regression checks, or general tool obscurity. > > Regards, > Russell VT > grey beard > [-- Attachment #2: wilson96.vcf --] [-- Type: text/x-vcard, Size: 431 bytes --] BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:4.0 EMAIL;PREF=1:wilson@ds.net EMAIL:wilson96@xfinity.com FN:Brian Wilson ORG:The Home Depot;Dev. Tools TITLE:Senior Systems Engineer N:Wilson;Brian;;; ADR:;;2250 Newmarket Pkwy SE;Marietta;GA;30067;United States of America TEL;TYPE=home;VALUE=TEXT:+1 (678) 376-9258 TEL;TYPE=cell;VALUE=TEXT:+1 (678) 232-9357 URL;VALUE=URL:https://homedepot.com UID:6d506c0e-6284-4e39-9c45-df7a649c804c END:VCARD ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: META: Fix the signup procedure? 2021-08-11 11:36 ` Brian S. Wilson @ 2021-08-11 12:15 ` Russell VT 0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread From: Russell VT @ 2021-08-11 12:15 UTC (permalink / raw) To: wilson; +Cc: cygwin, Brian S. Wilson Holy over-quote, batman! On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 4:37 AM Brian S. Wilson via Cygwin < cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote: > As a long time user I would oppose an "age" related test to invalidate > emails. Long time users are less likely to be spammers than new email > sign ups. That's kind of... the point??? Extending the required account age increases the "cost" of trying to use that account for spam by several magnitudes of "cost." If they have to create a new account, and wait a week prior to posting... that's going to decrease the number of spambots. It's detrimental, in that any one "worthy" of decidedly running Cygwin on any platform, likely has the wherewithal to have done their initial research, prior to checking with the list. So, it naturally increases their overall time. prior to being able to seek an adequate solution. Either that, or you turn on every-post-moderation ... or, "only approved senders" - but that is an enormous request/offload to the mod team, here. That said, it does seem that we are getting quite a bit of > spam from the Cygwin email list and it would be nice if something along > the lines of email verification could be done to prevent this. > And, *that's what I originally said*... /sighs Currently the list is running Mailman version 2.1.29 (2018-07-24) <https://launchpad.net/mailman/+milestone/2.1.29> ... that's "eons" in Internet Time (tm). The latest in the 2.1 timeline is v.2.1.34 (2020-06-27) <https://launchpad.net/mailman/+milestone/2.1.34> with 2.1.35 receiving active maintenance commits. There's a new major release (3.0), though like most-things GNU, it's still not in stable-release mode... that said, there's already a Version 3.1 <https://launchpad.net/mailman/+milestone/3.1> branch, in alpha/pre-alpha). Point being, there are plenty of things that can be done to "fix" this sort of thing... but, we are at the mercy of the list admins, or listserv owners for those sorts of fixes. But, IIRC, email verification has been in the mailman configuration options, pretty much since Majordomo owned the vast majority of public mailing lists. ;-) Cheers - RVT -- Russell M. Van Tassell <russellvt@gmail.com> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: META: Fix the signup procedure? 2021-08-11 11:26 META: Fix the signup procedure? Russell VT 2021-08-11 11:36 ` Brian S. Wilson @ 2021-08-12 5:24 ` Christopher Faylor 2021-08-12 7:18 ` Russell VT 2021-08-12 10:36 ` Valerio Messina 2 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread From: Christopher Faylor @ 2021-08-12 5:24 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Russell VT; +Cc: cygwin On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 04:26:18AM -0700, Russell VT wrote: >List Admins - > >Can one of you powerful folks, please, fix the signup approvals and >make it a bit more difficult to signup and account that is "allowed" to >post on this list? The cygwin list has been open for around 23 years or so. Making the list subscriber-only (which seems to be what you're asking for) raises the barrier to asking questions and impedes the purpose of a "help" mailing list. Moderation is an option but I doubt anyone really wants to moderate every message here. cgf -- cygwin.com/sourceware.org administrator ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: META: Fix the signup procedure? 2021-08-12 5:24 ` Christopher Faylor @ 2021-08-12 7:18 ` Russell VT 2021-08-12 7:41 ` Sam Edge 0 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread From: Russell VT @ 2021-08-12 7:18 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Russell VT, cygwin On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 10:24 PM Christopher Faylor < cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please@cygwin.com> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 04:26:18AM -0700, Russell VT wrote: > >Can one of you powerful folks, please, fix the signup approvals and > >make it a bit more difficult to signup and account that is "allowed" to > >post on this list? > > The cygwin list has been open for around 23 years or so. Indeed... this is a crucial point, actually. > Making the > list subscriber-only (which seems to be what you're asking for) raises > the barrier to asking questions and impedes the purpose of a "help" > mailing list. I was actually talking maybe "one-step-over" subscriber-only (going back to the general Majordomo premise of "anyone can subscribe/unsubscribe anyone, with enough ingenuity and desire. So, being "on" the list isn't really a factor, in that it's trivial to spoof all the "important" sides of the conversation. That said, GIVEN the age of this mailing list, with "a well-known name and a long history," there's probably not a single public advertised email address, at such an old and well-known domain, that isn't literally pummeled with SPAM, daily. It's already remarkable how little spam we see here... so, there's clearly *more* happening here. In short, spammers scripts are likely "figuring out" how to bypass the signup features on the older Mailman Python scripts, and are getting around the captchas or whatever else is in-place on this "not-too-terribly-old" version. FWIW, I've also been noticing more form-spam, lately, that's managed to get through a couple of my own sites. So, time to make things session based, and multiple interlaced pages (also, those are amusing logs to monitor... but, I digress). > Moderation is an option but I doubt anyone really wants > to moderate every message here. > Can't say I would disagree, though back it the time, I've seen teams easily handle higher traffic lists with a pretty small moderation team. > > cgf > -- cygwin.com/sourceware.org administrator > > -- Russell M. Van Tassell <russellvt@gmail.com> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: META: Fix the signup procedure? 2021-08-12 7:18 ` Russell VT @ 2021-08-12 7:41 ` Sam Edge 2021-08-12 7:54 ` Russell VT 0 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread From: Sam Edge @ 2021-08-12 7:41 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cygwin On 12/08/2021 08:18, Russell VT via Cygwin wrote: > >> Moderation is an option but I doubt anyone really wants >> to moderate every message here. >> > > Can't say I would disagree, though back it the time, I've seen teams easily > handle higher traffic lists with a pretty small moderation team. Sounds like an offer to me. Thanks Russell. ;-) -- Sam Edge ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: META: Fix the signup procedure? 2021-08-12 7:41 ` Sam Edge @ 2021-08-12 7:54 ` Russell VT 0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread From: Russell VT @ 2021-08-12 7:54 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Cygwin (maillist) On Thu, Aug 12, 2021 at 12:43 AM Sam Edge via Cygwin <cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote: > On 12/08/2021 08:18, Russell VT via Cygwin wrote: > > > I've seen teamseasily > > handle higher traffic lists with a pretty small moderation team. > > Sounds like an offer to me. Thanks Russell. ;-) > LMAO... Sorry, ummm... /gulp. No, thank you? LOL I think you also "missed" (/s) the quote where I said I couldn't blame our awesome hosts, here, for NOT wanting to spend their entire lives fiddling around with a stupid-but-necessary mailing list. That said, this place is STILL more-helpful than Reddit. ;-) Cheers! RVT -- Russell M. Van Tassell <russellvt@gmail.com> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: META: Fix the signup procedure? 2021-08-11 11:26 META: Fix the signup procedure? Russell VT 2021-08-11 11:36 ` Brian S. Wilson 2021-08-12 5:24 ` Christopher Faylor @ 2021-08-12 10:36 ` Valerio Messina 2021-08-12 17:05 ` Christopher Faylor 2 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread From: Valerio Messina @ 2021-08-12 10:36 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cygwin On 8/11/21 1:26 PM, Russell VT via Cygwin wrote: > Can one of you powerful folks, please, fix the signup approvals and make it > a bit more difficult to signup and account that is "allowed" to post on > this list? as now the subscribe procedure is a simple: 0) open the web page: https://cygwin.com/mailman/listinfo/cygwin/ 1) fill form with name, email and pass 2) press the Subscribe button 3) receive a confirmation mail 4) follow the link in the mail 5) press the subscribe button in the new web page all steps are easily script-able with 'curl' So in my opinion first thing to do is to add a CAPTCHA [1] in the step 1 I tried to contact the list admin sent from IP: 8.43.85.97 that is <noc@redhat.com> asking for removal of spammers once we received every spam, but spamming continue. I also noted a big increase in spam directed to my email, once I made a post to the list. This is probably related to the fact the list archive is freely available to web spiders at: https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin/ with email sender visible as first line once you open an mail. So second action to do is report the 'name' of sender but not the email in those pages, or at least blacken the domain part @domain.tld [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA thank you, -- Valerio ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
* Re: META: Fix the signup procedure? 2021-08-12 10:36 ` Valerio Messina @ 2021-08-12 17:05 ` Christopher Faylor 0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread From: Christopher Faylor @ 2021-08-12 17:05 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cygwin On Thu, Aug 12, 2021 at 12:36:12PM +0200, Valerio Messina wrote: >On 8/11/21 1:26 PM, Russell VT via Cygwin wrote: >>Can one of you powerful folks, please, fix the signup approvals and make it >>a bit more difficult to signup and account that is "allowed" to post on >>this list? > >as now the subscribe procedure is a simple: >0) open the web page: https://cygwin.com/mailman/listinfo/cygwin/ >1) fill form with name, email and pass >2) press the Subscribe button >3) receive a confirmation mail >4) follow the link in the mail >5) press the subscribe button in the new web page >all steps are easily script-able with 'curl' >So in my opinion first thing to do is to add a CAPTCHA [1] in the step 1 You can post to this list without subscribing so this wouldn't accomplish anything besides annoying people who want to subscribe. >I tried to contact the list admin sent from IP: 8.43.85.97 >that is <noc@redhat.com> asking for removal of spammers once we >received every spam, but spamming continue. That email address has nothing (or at least very little) to do with cygwin.com / sourceware.org. The right address is "postmaster", which is monitored by me. That said, I sure do not want to hear from "helpful" people pointing out spam. I monitor multiple lists for spam, block offending parties, and generate rules for spamassassin to stop similar messages from coming through. I see a lot more spam than anyone here and there's no reason to have someone add to the load by pointlesly showing me more. >I also noted a big increase in spam directed to my email, once I made >a post to the list. This is probably related to the fact the list >archive is freely available to web spiders at: >https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin/ >with email sender visible as first line once you open an mail. >So second action to do is report the 'name' of sender but not the >email in those pages, or at least blacken the domain part @domain.tld We used to munge email addresses in a previous version of the mailing list but it was decided to stop doing so a couple of years ago when we moved to a new server / new mailing list software. The bottom line is that we're all volunteers here. It's unlikely that anyone is going to offer up more of their time to customize the tried-and-true mailing list software used by sourceware.org / cygwin.com / gcc.gnu.org. If the small amount of spam seen here bothers you then please don't contribute to it by publicly remarking on it. Unsubscribing is the best way to not see any more spam from the cygwin mailing list. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2021-08-12 17:06 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 9+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2021-08-11 11:26 META: Fix the signup procedure? Russell VT 2021-08-11 11:36 ` Brian S. Wilson 2021-08-11 12:15 ` Russell VT 2021-08-12 5:24 ` Christopher Faylor 2021-08-12 7:18 ` Russell VT 2021-08-12 7:41 ` Sam Edge 2021-08-12 7:54 ` Russell VT 2021-08-12 10:36 ` Valerio Messina 2021-08-12 17:05 ` Christopher Faylor
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