Inappropriate tone on this mailing list and requirement for governance

[Lorenzo Taylor]

According to Brian:
There's nothing sensible you can do about this - identity on the
internet is slippery
(and many people prefer it that way)

Including myself, I just choose not to abuse this right as some would-be 
flamethrowers do. Point well taken nonetheless.

OTOH, it would be one pain in the neck vs say four list admins.  I'm
sure the problem poster
will give up resubscribing before the admins give up blocking him/her.

Probably right, although some troublemakers just won't give up.

Filtering by automated content matching will not work.  Too many false
positives, and too many
ways around it.  How many different ways do the spammers discuss the
size of your <xxx> ?

Actually I was thinking along those lines, something like a spam filter, but you 
are probably right, although gmail's spam filter seems to work quite well here 
now after some training. It shouldn't take that long on a list this size with 
this much traffic. Although how to improve upon this concept so that problem 
messages are removed, but people at the end of their rope trying to get 
something to work who have a few choice words to say about their computers or 
this f**king menu.lst file are preserved. Maybe a spam filter is the right way 
to go, where the messages that are flagged are sent to moderators transparently 
for approval. This preferably large group of moderators could then train the 
filtering system by approving the good stuff with not-so-nice words and the like 
in it while deleting the trouble posts like "stupid **** troublemakers", calling 
names and flaming individuals/races/nations and other inappropriate posts that 
are generally hurtful to people.

Lorenzo