Adding new members to the newsgroup

[Douglas Mullin]

There were a couple of spam events from the newsgroup in the last week and as a result I've made a small change to the process of adding new members. 

Up till yesterday, a new member simply had to provide a justification or reason for wanting to join. If anything remotely credible was provided, I would approve the request and the new member could immediately post. Last week this resulted in spam being sent to the newsgroup; I took away the member's posting rights but this doesn't apply instantly and he was able to make another 'contribution' before being silenced.

As a result, I've changed things so new members can only post through moderation. Basically, their first post will need to be approved before it hits the rest of the group. If their post is paragliding / hang gliding / aviation related (even if it is somewhat commercial in nature, like selling a wing or advertising a course) I'll approve it.  I will also remove the need for moderation for that member in the future. 

This doesn't make a huge amount of difference except a new member's first post will take a little longer to hit the newsgroup as a whole. This delay will be somewhat variable but it's unlikely to be more than a few hours. 

Now, there are alternatives to this approach.

One approach (recommended by Jeff Wishnie) is to engage with potential new members and ask why they want to join. This is probably more secure but it's not something I'm willing to do (it takes too much time and I don't want to conduct an e-mail thread across time-zones with potential bad actors). If there's a view that this is the approach we should take, I'd like a volunteer to do this task and I'll pass newsgroup management over to this person.

Another approach is to not worry too much about occasional spam events and to revert to letting new members post immediately. I'm happy to make this change if this is the consensus view.

And, of course, you may have your own suggestions. 

Feedback is welcome!

Regards, Douglas

PS. I don't really know the importance of this newsgroup; has it been effectively replaced with newer technology? Should we just close it down? Postings are way down compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Last year 14 new members joined the group. It's not a technology that Google seems to be investing in at all (e.g. spam detection in e-mail has progressed a lot over the last 10 years or so, but not on google groups). 

[jeffrey wishnie]

Just a heads up that I've seen several cases of spammers using genai (probably automated) to provide superficially legit sounding answers on my neighborhood list. 

Instead of asking why they want to join I now ask "what's your address and who told you about the list" --and get fun responses with non existent addresses

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