JC Dill always seems to think I mean something other than what I wrote:
| Which makes it very odd that you would consider this "good list
| management software".
Who considers it good? I was throwing out possibilities ... both in the sense
of lobbing them to the list and in that of discarding them. I stated
explicitly that those two examples would prevent most humans from confirming,
so obviously I think they're damn lousy.
| If list management software could distinguish
| between a reply-bot and a human, for it to be considered "good" it would
| have to do it in a way that doesn't foil the normal human subscription
| confirmation process.
Exactly. I never said otherwise. Alvin Oga said "good list management
software" could make the distinction, and I was trying to come up with some
ways, but the two I had aren't good and aren't worth trying. However, if they
help someone else here to think of a way that *is* good, then they were worth
mentioning.
| IMHO, such a software product doesn't exist,
| because there is no way (via text email) to make the process both easy
| for the human and difficult for a reply-bot.
"There is no way" is going a little too far. There is as yet no way, but it
hasn't been proved impossible. The next idea I had right after my earlier
post was to ask a simple question, but since then Stan Ryckman has covered
that.
Tom Neff gave an example of non-HTML graphics:
: There is also this method:
:
: JxIA0KDQo8aHRtb
: 9uXCBjb2xvXj0iI
: RybX5nPkRXTidUI
: MgSUXgSEXTVE9SW
: NlbnRXcXI+PGZvb
: wgc2FuXy1zZXJpZ
: JhdGVXbXJ0Z2FnZ
: 1heSXiZSXhcyBsb
: 9vcXBjcmVXaXQgb
: BnXyB1cCEgXC9mb
: NpemU9IjIiIGZhY
:
: What letter do you see in the above block?
I saw nothing at first. Then I switched to a fixed-pitch font and still saw
nothing. A second fixed-pitch font, still nothing. There's the catch: to
make sure the reader has the right view, you have to sacrifice plain text and
instead use some markup to specify a display font.
Finally I traced all the capital X's and saw that they form a capital X, but
if my earlier examples are too involved for the typical human reader, this one
is scarcely any better. Few people would bother, and all told I think this
method is no better than those I tossed out earlier.
Dill again, on the suggestion of moderating the first few posts from each
subscriber:
| This solution doesn't work for high volume lists and especially for
| lists where being able to post promptly is an important feature of the
| list (such as a list for users of network infrastructure equipment).
| The list manager can't be there 24x7 to approve posts, and if the list
| isn't immediately available to legitimate on-topic posters with an
| urgent question, then the list will slowly diminish as other lists (that
| don't suffer from this delay) are created and touted as a better resource.
On non-urgent lists it works well; if the volume is high, appoint one or two
comoderators, ideally spread out over the world's time zones. If the list's
nature is such that subscribers must be able to post immediately, you'll
remain at risk for manually dispatched spam even if you find a way to stop the
bots, but you may decide that it's worth tolerating the occasional incident in
order to keep the benefit that that list gets from immediate posting
privileges.
Follow-Ups:
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