List membership [Re: how to contact the IETF]

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 2009-02-10 15:12, David Morris wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, 10 Feb 2009, John Levine wrote:
> 
>> Any chance we could require that one subscribes to the list before
>> posting to it?  I realize that sufficiently motivated drive-bys could
>> subscribe, send, and leave, but it might reinforce the idea that IETF
>> lists are for debate, not for screeds.
> 
> Subscribe, or perhaps have to go through a challenge response like one
> does with craigslist if not a registered user. Send your email ... it
> goes in a pending queue ... you get a response back that requires some
> action on your part like going to a web page and completing a captcha ....

The IETF list already has that; if you read the FSF's instructions to
its disciples, you will note that they even documented this fact.

Subscribing is easy (and rightly so), so I'm not sure it would
help with the problem of drive-bys. People who actually want to
join the debate are presumably here already. People who
don't want to listen will use the delete key if they have to join.

My real beef in this case is not the fact of having to delete a lot
of one-bit messages. It's that the FSF's incitation is based on
factual errors as well as emotional language. I've posted my
complaint to them at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/FSFmail.txt
It may be considered as a contribution under RFC5378.

    Brian