Re: 9442-92C3-C7E6 : CONSULT from pgsql-announce (post)

On Mon, Aug 02, 2010 at 02:25:23PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-08-02 at 14:20 -0700, David Fetter wrote:
>
> > That sounds like an excellent idea!
>
> > What are your criteria for success in this endeavor, and what are
> > the criteria for taking more decisive action? People in our
> > community have been "talking to" these folks for a lot of years,
> > thus far without effect, so I'm curious what makes you think this
> > time will be different, and more specifically, when you will
> > decide that "talking to" them is insufficient.
>
> When there is obvious intent to defraud our community in some way.

That's a bold and unprecedented policy you just invented.

Until now, putting up something irrelevant has been plenty of reason
to reject any individual submission for the web site, and
too-often-repeated submissions, even when 100% relevant, have been
enough to get someone banned. I can name at least one recent company
name if you insist.

If we're going to institute this, "it's only a spam if it's a scam"
policy, we need to get super clear as to what the effects of such a
policy will be. That's probably a topic for a separate thread,
though, and probably consensus of -core, too. It's really that big a
change.

> Ignorance, being busy and making mistakes doesn't imply that in any
> way.

Excellent point. We need to develop the criteria for judging when the
assumption of good will has run out. You may think it's further away
than I do, and that's why we need to get those criteria clear and in
advance.

I'd like to humbly recommend that we *not* abandon our extensive
records, which we'd be doing if we were to start from a blank slate
now.

> > We need clear criteria here. Will one more list spam do it? Ten?
> > A thousand? Their track record makes it seem likely that they'll
> > cross each of those thresholds sooner rather than later.
>
> Well honestly, I don't really care about the announce spam. I know
> where these guys are coming from and I feel for them.

They've made choices, among them the choice to borrow money. Are *we*
supposed to take responsibility for the choices they've made?

> -announce is one address our of likely a hundred thousand they are
> sending. If they have a legacy database, or are using a service
> (which they are) it could be very easy to have multiple points of
> failure.

Yes, there are points at which we'll have to judge that they failed
and take action, even if we assume it's all a terrible mix-up.

It's those points I'd like to help clarify.

> > Or are we going to sell spamming licenses? That seems to be the
> > alternative. What are they going to cost the first time? The tenth?
> > How long will they be good for, and do we hit people up for automated
> > subscriptions? I'm really curious as to how we're going to set this
> > up.
>
> Well to me we are solving a non-existent problem.

I'm pretty sure you're alone in that.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david(dot)fetter(at)gmail(dot)com
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