The current moderation system is quite inefficient as every moderator gets every mail and needs to review each one to decide what to do.
There's no sharing of effort. This issue has been solved for the case of some ASF lists (announce, press, etc), by using a shared GMail account. However the solution only applies where all moderators are allowed access to all lists. Also it would not be scaleable for project lists. So I've started looking at what might be required to use Whimsy to moderate mails, e.g. using a modified version of the Secretary workbench. The workbench implements a dynamic list of unprocessed mails. As soon as a mail has been processed, it disappears from the list, so generally only one moderator would need to view each email. There are potential advantages of using a custom solution (rather than GMail). Many times, the same spam is sent to multiple lists. So there is scope for automatically detecting and ignoring all similar mails. And if a mail is manually detected as spam, all similar mails can be marked likewise. Where an email is to be rejected (e.g. wrong list), it would be easy to provide template replies. The workbench would receive all moderation requests, and only show those for which the user has karma. [There might need to be further filtering to reduce the load for ASF members.] If the UI is carefully designed, I think this would make a moderators job much easier, and should mean fewer moderators are needed overall. Some figures: 250-1000 mod requests per day; average around 700 across all lists (public and private) 150-200+ 'obvious' spam mails (duplicates across multiple lists) Sebb.
