Discussion Forums/Proposal
What's the current set-up?
All our discussion forums have three access points - Google Groups for web, news.mozilla.org for NNTP, and lists.mozilla.org for email. Each is used by different sections of the community, and web-based is particularly useful for emailing links to people.
What's the problem?
Spam. Coming in from Google Groups to the newsgroups and mailing lists.
What can be done about the spam in Google Groups archives?
The way we have it set up now, nothing. :-( Once spam gets in, there's no way to cancel it.
Doesn't Google Groups have moderation controls?
Only for groups which are natively hosted there, not ones which are mirrored from elsewhere.
So could we move to being fully hosted at Google Groups, to get moderation controls?
John Resig would suggest that was a mistake and a move in the wrong direction.
So what can we do?
1. Make Google fix things (unlikely).
2. Move to another provider for the web-based interface to our groups. We could consider:
3. The plan below.
What is the cunning plan?
The spam is currently coming in from Google Groups as news to Giganews, and thereby to the mailing lists. So we can run it through SpamAssassin then, but it's already in news and GG.
If we set all the Google Groups and newsgroups to "moderated", both Giganews and Google Groups will email us new posts for approval before posting them. We can then run them through SpamAssassin (as we currently do with new mailing list posts) and any other approval mechanisms we want before they appear anywhere.
What positive effects would this have?
Assuming SpamAssassin is working well, this would stop the spam. It would also centralise approvals, allowing us to e.g. move to global whitelist-based posting if we want.
What negative effects will this have?
During the 24 hours of changeover: some messages may appear in one medium and not in others. We would blog to make people aware of the issue.
Long-term: the owner of each group will start getting emails about their "moderation queue", which will mostly be full of spam. But there's a setting they can set to auto-discard it so they aren't bothered, if they want to.
Also, messages may take longer to propagate, because there are extra steps (email from Google Groups or Giganews to us, and a reply). We're not sure what the delay will be, but it could be up to 7-8 minutes from submitting a message to seeing it appear in any of the three access points.