Widely recognized definitely effective

Yo, Dick! Get the kid off the computer!

This garbage slipped through the cracks. Under robo-moderation, sometimes that happens. Once is enough to put everyone on notice and I presume this sociopath's e-mail address is now in the "burn-before-read" file.

Dick

Just to clarify for the readers: the main thing that is "robo" about robo-moderation is that messages from known good posters (the pre-approved list) go through automatically. All other posts are still subject to human review, although spam that is detectable as such will not waste their time. (Folks get on the pre-approved list after establishing a positive record of contributions according to the group charter and guidelines).

The trickle of recent spam postings is probably some other kind of glitch. The good news is, the person (Jonathan Kamens) who manages this software (STUMP) for the group knows what he is doing and will undoubtedly get it straightened out soon.

-Mark Bole

"Mark Bole" wrote

So what are you saying? That any post that talks about the landlord "double dipping" will be culled out as spam?

The last one was my bad. For what it's worth, I was on a conference call, and got distracted. Once I hit 'sent', that was that. No more multitasking for me, and apologies to the group. Joe

See the subject line of another recent spam posting here: "10 good reasons for being longer".

Sure, some threads go on much longer than they would have under the previous manual moderation system, but I think the trade-off is worth it. Earlier this year, you posted a strong endorsement of robo-moderation, hopefully you are not re-considering your position.

-Mark Bole

"Mark Bole" wrote

Nope. I think it's a good idea.

And it gives Dick a break to attend more beer tasting competitions - not to mention all the practice hours.

It's a "wetware" glitch, not a glitch in the moderation software. The spam postings that have shown up in the past few days were accidentally approved by the moderators. Even the moderators sometimes make mistakes. Well, the ones other than Dick, anyway :-).

I can cancel the spam messages that get approved by accident, but they usually leak out to everywhere before I can do that (it only takes a few minutes after they're approved before they are transmitted everywhere, and many sites don't accept cancel messages, which means even when I generate cancel messages, some people are unfortunately still going to see the spam.