How to communicate among the Task Force + Procedure for our Google Group to avoid spam
Attinger, Steve
Hello Task Force,
For some reason we've had a recent deluge of spammers attempting to join one or more of the groups. A few have joined successfully, but I believe at this point Gary has deleted them all.
Based on a conversation with Julie Lovins, and an email thread with the Waste group, the Task Force needs to lock things down to avoid spammers.
So, via this email I'm asking GARY YOUNG to do the following 2 things:
(1) Make it such that any new person must "apply" to join ANY of the working groups, the General Discussion list, or the Official Notices list. As part of this process, require the applicant to explain why s/he wants to join by typing an explanation in a field. The working group chair or Gary will then decide whether to grant access on a case by case basis. If this "explanation" field is not possible, I'd recommend the following option provided by Gary:
"Make some best guesses on who to admit. Hope we get it right by extremely cursory inspection. Stamp out remaining spammers manually."
(2) Re-send an invitation to ALL 68 task force members to join the "GENERAL DISCUSSION" email list. I understand that not everyone is subscribed to this list, and I propose that General Discussion be the list you use to talk amongst yourselves going forward.
(GARY: is there any way to have the invitation only go to those Task Force members who aren't already members of the General Discussion list?)
IMPORTANT - PLEASE NOTE:
From this point forward the Task Force is a self-operating entity. I will not be making any further decisions regarding how to structure the Google groups, or other such things. I simply don't have time to handle this, and it is outside of my responsibilities at this point. I am happy to provide guidance or feedback on questions specifically related to getting the 89 recommendations implemented going forward, but outside of that the Task Force is self-governing.
I hope this helps get the group on a level playing field, and able to easily communicate among the members.
Cheers,
Steve
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Steve Attinger
Environmental Sustainability Coordinator
City of Mountain View
Public Works Department
500 Castro Street
Mountain View, CA 94041
“Intelligence, filtered through the heart, is wisdom.”
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Please think twice before printing this or any email.
Gary Young
I've implemented Steve's item #1. And all of the existing task force
members should have been marked "managers" of the groups they're in
(and are welcome to be managers in the others), and they should all
have the ability to approve membership requests. So feel free to help
screen membership in response to the membership requests. I suppose
it's still a great thing for us to have more people helping and aware
of environmental concerns. :)
Unfortunately #2 is not very feasible. Many of our members asked me to
switch their email addresses, and many members have changed their
email addresses in the group membership themselves, so I don't have a
comprehensive list of the task force's email addresses. But if anyone
still wants to join the groups, they should still be able to.
Also, I went through all of the groups, and manually removed all the
spam I could find, and banned all of the spammers I could find. So the
discussion lists should be cleaner. It's possible that I accidentally
banned a couple legitimate users, so please extend my apologies to
anyone who mentions getting banned, and I'll be happy to assist them
in re-joining. I did try to err on the side of leaving people in the
group, though.
Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.
-Gary