META: Fix the signup procedure?

[Russell VT]

Holy over-quote, batman!

On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 4:37 AM Brian S. Wilson via Cygwin <
cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:

> As a long time user I would oppose an "age" related test to invalidate
>
emails.  Long time users are less likely to be spammers than new email
> sign ups.


That's kind of... the point??? Extending the required account age increases
the "cost" of trying to use that account for spam by several magnitudes of
"cost." If they have to create a new account, and wait a week prior to
posting... that's going to decrease the number of spambots.

It's detrimental, in that any one "worthy" of decidedly running Cygwin on
any platform, likely has the wherewithal to have done their initial
research, prior to checking with the list. So, it naturally increases their
overall time. prior to being able to seek an adequate solution.

Either that, or you turn on every-post-moderation ... or, "only approved
senders" - but that is an enormous request/offload to the mod team, here.

That said, it does seem that we are getting quite a bit of
> spam from the Cygwin email list and it would be nice if something along
> the lines of email verification could be done to prevent this.
>

And, *that's what I originally said*... /sighs

Currently the list is running Mailman version 2.1.29 (2018-07-24)
<https://launchpad.net/mailman/+milestone/2.1.29> ... that's "eons" in
Internet Time (tm). The latest in the 2.1 timeline is v.2.1.34 (2020-06-27)
<https://launchpad.net/mailman/+milestone/2.1.34> with 2.1.35 receiving
active maintenance commits. There's a new major release (3.0), though like
most-things GNU, it's still not in stable-release mode... that said,
there's already a Version 3.1
<https://launchpad.net/mailman/+milestone/3.1> branch,
in alpha/pre-alpha).

Point being, there are plenty of things that can be done to "fix" this sort
of thing... but, we are at the mercy of the list admins, or listserv owners
for those sorts of fixes.

But, IIRC, email verification has been in the mailman configuration
options, pretty much since Majordomo owned the vast majority of public
mailing lists. ;-)

Cheers -
RVT

-- 
Russell M. Van Tassell <russellvt@gmail.com>