Ken,
You made the thankless task sound so inviting...

Well, someone has finally asked for something that I MIGHT be able to help
with.  I wouldn't say I have a "STRONG mental map" though.  Am I even
watching the right lists?  I suspect that the 15-30 minutes you mention may
need to be expanded if I am not completely familiar with what is going on...

So...I'd like to say I'll give it a shot.  I do have business guests coming
from out of town to work on a project for the first 3 weeks of December, so
I guess that would be as good a time as any to see if I touch it during
times of increased workload!

I won't be near a computer until Monday the first due to Thanksgiving
travel, but I read your plea, and having been an Airborne Ranger Medic for
nearly 8 years, I felt a kinship to you and your thankless, annoying, and no
doubt boring and tedious task.

I suppose it's the least I could do for all the help and feedback I have
received from the community.  But what if I can't keep up???!!!

Take care,

Rob

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Ken Causey <ken at kencausey.com> wrote:

> Do you have 15-30 minutes per week you can spare?  Have you been
> observing this community for a while and have gained a strong mental map
> of names of community participants and projects?  If so then we need
> you.
>
> The Announcements list is a major spam magnet.  Just as a rough guess I
> would say we receive on the order of 1000 spam per each valid
> submission.  The list is fully moderated and to keep up with this volume
> of spam the list has to be moderated regularly.
>
> If you accepted this job you would:
>
> 1.  Start receiving far more spam in the form of announcements list
> moderation requests.  The spam would be in the form of attachment to
> each request and the emails themselves have a standard format, so would
> be easy to filter out.
>
> 2.  Carefully look through the announcement moderation requests at each
> opportunity (hopefully at least once a day) looking for valid
> submissions.  Realistically you can just scan the subjects which include
> the email address of the submitter.  In all likelihood you will
> recognize an email address for a valid submission and then look at the
> message itself to confirm.
>
> All list moderators would get all messages and so missing one is no
> great problem as one of the other moderators would probably catch it.
> If you find a valid submission you would login to the moderation
> interface (web-based) and search for and accept only that submission,
> leaving the rest of the moderation queue.
>
> 3.  Once or twice a week (schedule to be determined and depends on
> number of volunteers) you would scan through the entire moderation queue
> for valid messages.  In this case the easiest information to spot is the
> subject and so you would be looking for names of projects and relevant
> keywords.  Mark each valid submission (if any) and then submit the
> entire moderation queue having all the spam deleted automatically.
>
> This is a largely thankless and annoying job.  Very few announcements
> are sent to the announcements list yet.  I wish I knew why and what to
> do about it.  All I know to do at this point is be patient, and I'm
> asking you to assist me in this and cut down on the volume of messages I
> have to scan.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Ken Causey
>
>
>
>
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