<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 8:28 AM, Amedee Van Gasse <<a href="mailto:amedee-ubuntu@amedee.be">amedee-ubuntu@amedee.be</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="im">On Thu, September 29, 2011 17:23, Rashkae wrote: > My idea is simply that mailman requires a function to 'lock a thread'. > When invoked by a moderator, any reply to any message in that discussion > thread gets rejected. I see no reason why this would not be relatively > trivial to implement. Sure, it would be easy for people to work around, > but only a few would, and those can be dealt with directly as > misbehaving agents. I think that effectively disabling people's 'reply' > button to an unwanted discussion thread would solve 90% of the problems > with a list like this. </div>Due to the nature of SMTP (SIMPLE mail transfer protocol), this would be (almost) impossible to implement. </blockquote><div>There's a feature similar to this on Google Groups, and I like it a lot. That one actually works on new accounts. In the groups I manage, each new member is set on moderation status, so that I have to approve or reject their messages. As it works for me, if they never post there's no problem. If their first post is reasonable, I remove the moderation. I can restore the moderation or ban the user for future infractions, but I've never had to. In practice, this filters out the folks who join just to spam the group. It's low maintenance for me because I get an email whenever I have to take action, and this is just for each user's first post. When there are no first posts, I don't even have to think about it. The result for members is also good: they haven't seen spam in years. It would be interesting to see if the list could have a selective "hold and moderate" feature like this. </div></div> -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD