On 12/10/2016 9:43 AM, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
On Sat, 10 Dec 2016 09:28 pm, Terry Reedy wrote:
The spammer will still be counted,
Why reward someone who actively evades defenses? If you want to count
spam, it is mostly missing, at least as far as python-list is concerned.
Its not a reward. Spammers are not like trolls, they don't hang around to
see the result of their posts.
To me, the relevant difference is between posts related to python and
those not. It is usually clear which is which.
> There no evidence at all that this Italian
spammer is looking for replies or responses to his(?) posts. He apparently
just fires them out.
I think that it is relevant that comp.lang.python receives X spam messages
from a certain person. It gives a picture of the health of the newsgroup:
how much of it is spam? Hopefully only a small amount.
Python-list gets unrelated-to-python spam from lots of people. They are
not outliers (unlike jmf's now blocked trolls), but contaminents from a
different universe.
I agree that the fraction of messages that are clearly spam has some
interest in itself, and definitely should be as small as possible. But I
contend that they should be excluded from a study of the universe of
python-related messages.
My other point is that this small sliver that used to get passed through
is extremely biased and statistically worthless as a study of
python-list spamming. If one wanted to study the rate and nature of
contamination, or the effectiveness of filtering, one would need access
to the raw stream of submissions.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
