Proposal on mailing list changes

[Pasi Lallinaho]

On 2014-05-15 09:28, Elfy wrote:
> On 14/05/14 22:25, Pasi Lallinaho wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> For a more complete history on the issue, refer to the discussion on
>> organizing mailing lists [1].
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> THE SUMMARY
>>
>> 1) Keep the lists we have now
>> 2) Enable the moderation flag for all current and new subscribers,
>> excluding the Xubuntu team
>> 3) Correspond with senders as needed via the mailman Decline feature
>> 4) Disable the moderation flag for other trusted senders and developers
>>
>> THE DISCUSSION
>>
>> Go ahead.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Pasi
>>
>> [1]
>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/xubuntu-devel/2014-April/010088.html
>>
>
> Questions -
>
> I know there are at least 2 extra moderators for the list - how many
> is that in total now?
> How long should a message be left hanging in the mod list before we're
> being lazy?
>
> Kev
>

We have in total five moderators for the development list at the moment.
We should probably add Simon to the admins as well, making the total six.

I think a fair processing time for any mail is 2-3 days, or in the case
of weekend in the middle, a day or two more. This should be reasonable
with the amount of moderators.

Here's some relevant statistics from the last six months:
    April 2014: 183 messages, 62 auto-approvable messages (33,9%), 44
threads
    March 2014: 135 messages, 57 auto-approvable messages (42,2%), 42
threads
    February 2014: 134 messages, 50 auto-approvable messages (37,3%), 31
threads
    January 2014: 108 messages, 51 auto-approvable messages (47,2%), 26
threads
    December 2013: 107 messages, 53 auto-approvable messages (49,5%), 35
threads
    November 2013: 67 messages, 36 auto-approvable messages (53,7%), 18
threads

Based on these statistics, the average amount of individual messages to
be moderated (excluding discarded messages*) is about 71. This means
about 12 messages per every individual moderator in a month, or 3 in a week.
* The discarded messages consist of outright spam and thus do not need
to be acted upon quickly, nor do the actions require more than a tiny
amount of consideration.

Another thing that the statistics tell me is that the amount of
non-auto-approvable* messages has gone up in percents during the six
months, which is one of the reasons we are considering new mailing lists
and/or moderation. While the numbers can't tell us the whole truth, it's
unlikely that the amount of outright inappropriate messages would have
stayed the same**.
* Auto-approvable messages are from the Xubuntu team plus some known
people who I'd have no problem auto-approving
** In addition to the raw numbers, this assumption is based on my
personal, purely non-statistical evaluation.

Finally, I wanted to add the amount of threads to the statistics. This
is because based on my experience, threads that start inappropriate
and/or irrelevant tend to stay that way. That being said, I believe that
if we keep declining the "first" messages to such threads, we will
practically have considerably less messages to moderate.

I hope this answers your question...

Cheers,
Pasi

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho (knome)                      » http://open.knome.fi/
Leader of Shimmer Project and Xubuntu       » http://shimmerproject.org/
Graphic artist, webdesigner, Ubuntu member  » http://xubuntu.org/