Migration plans for mensa.* newsgroups
Steve Levinthal
12:00AM and 6AM GMT, on Thursday, January 30, 2003.
Members of Mensa who wish to continue to use a newsreader should send the
following information to news...@mensa.org.
Member name: (first and last)
Member national group name:
Member local group name: (if applicable)
Membership expiration date:
Optionally, you may also send an initial password.
Starting January 28, members will receive e-mail containing the username and
password that will allow their newsreader to authenticate their connection
to the new private news server, and we hope to have ready the webpage that
will allow members to change their passwords.
The username will likely be in the form of first name, followed by a period,
followed by your last name. For example, joe.smith. Should someone else
apply with that name later, he might be joesmith2, or joseph.smith.
Our future plans for this username/password authentication, pending
approval, will be:
1. Support for vanity e-mail addresses. As long a message size doesn't
exceed some size (decided upon by committee) mail to
jane....@member.mensa.org would be forwarded to an address of her
choosing.
2. Member authentication to the member only sections of the Mensa
International website.
3. Assuming we get everything else in gear, and cooperation with national
and local groups, we would like to find a way to allow you to click-through
your configuration page on mensa.org directly to the member areas of your
national and local websites.
Newsgroup access will be the first use, and test of this system. We will be
refining it as we go along, and look forward to your suggestions, and
reports of any problems you encounter.
Thank you very much for bearing with us, and the moderators during this
transition.
Members (and non-members) may still participate in the forums via mailing
lists, which will be available at https://mailman.mensa.org/listinfo.
If you receive a notification that the site may not be secure, do not worry
about it. We are planning to provide a link that will allow you to accept
our Certificate Authority as valid.
Sincerely,
Steve Levinthal
Mensa International ServerTeam
Steve Levinthal
The migration to Mensa's new discussion forums will take place between
12:00AM and 6AM GMT, on Thursday, January 30, 2003.
Members of Mensa who wish to continue to use a newsreader should send the
following information to news...@mensa.org.
Member name: (first and last)
Member national group name:
Member local group name: (if applicable)
Membership number:
Vince
> The migration to Mensa's new discussion forums will take place between
> 12:00AM and 6AM GMT, on Thursday, January 30, 2003.
>
> Members of Mensa who wish to continue to use a newsreader should send
> the following information to news...@mensa.org.
>
> Member name: (first and last)
> Member national group name:
> Member local group name: (if applicable) Membership expiration date:
>
> Optionally, you may also send an initial password.
Will this be required of members who have already signed up via the web?
Or does the web signup only give you web access?
<snip>
> Our future plans for this username/password authentication, pending
> approval, will be:
>
> 1. Support for vanity e-mail addresses. As long a message size doesn't
> exceed some size (decided upon by committee) mail to
> jane....@member.mensa.org would be forwarded to an address of her
> choosing.
Huzzah! A long overdue idea. As I pontificated just before reading
this.<g>
> If you receive a notification that the site may not be secure, do not
> worry about it. We are planning to provide a link that will allow you
> to accept our Certificate Authority as valid.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Steve Levinthal
> Mensa International ServerTeam
--
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
Fredy
Fredy
"Vince" <vincest...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:e6LX9.7139$AV4.2024@sccrnsc01...
Steve Levinthal
<vincest...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Jan 2003 23:34:09 -0500, Steve Levinthal wrote:
>
>> The migration to Mensa's new discussion forums will take place between
>> 12:00AM and 6AM GMT, on Thursday, January 30, 2003.
>>
>> Members of Mensa who wish to continue to use a newsreader should send
>> the following information to news...@mensa.org.
>>
>> Member name: (first and last)
>> Member national group name:
>> Member local group name: (if applicable) Membership expiration date:
>>
>> Optionally, you may also send an initial password.
>
> Will this be required of members who have already signed up via the web?
> Or does the web signup only give you web access?
It will still be required of members who signed up via the web. It will
present the moderators with the OPTION of white-listing members who post
from a newsreader. Here's how it will work.
Posts made via the newsreader, will post instantly to the newsgroups, and
have to be moderated after the face. Why? I don't want to install STUMP on
what effectively will be a closed forum. That means if members lack the
ability to self-moderate their own posts, they lose the privilege of using a
newsreader. If that turns out to be a large group of people and I have to
install STUMP, I will, but I'll tease you all mercilessly, and mean it. :)
Messages passing either way through the mailing list can be "pre-moderated",
and will probably start that way for everyone. If the moderators want to
white-list a member, that name will have to be ON the mailing list in order
to do so. By the by, if you're a member planning to use only the newsreader
interface, you can set your address on the mailing list to "nomail" by using
mailman's handy-dandy web interface.
We're also not going to be keeping a lot of messages on the newsreader,
probably no longer than 30 days worth. These messages will always be
available via the mailman archive function (which we hope to add search to
in a month or two) and it seems a waste of space to duplicate the
information. It is our goal in the future to find or code a web interface
for posting to the forums as well. So, if you know of any Yahoo Mensa
forums that want the privacy of being served by their own organization, and
have their members avoid Yahoo's popups, have them get in touch with me or
my team.
> <snip>
>> Our future plans for this username/password authentication, pending
>> approval, will be:
>>
>> 1. Support for vanity e-mail addresses. As long a message size doesn't
>> exceed some size (decided upon by committee) mail to
>> jane....@member.mensa.org would be forwarded to an address of her
>> choosing.
>
> Huzzah! A long overdue idea. As I pontificated just before reading
> this.<g>
Well, whether or not it happens is not in my team's hands. We're building
the structure to support it, so that there will be no excuses. I personally
think it's an idea far-too-long in coming, and if it doesn't happen, you can
rest-assured I'll bite the political poison-pill, name names, and give out
the e-mail addresses of those responsible for it not happening. ;)
Just soliciting opinions here... what, if any limit do you think we should
put on message size/file-attach sizes that get sent to a vanity address?
Steve
Steve Levinthal
%iXX9.8378$bL4.8...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net, "Fredy"
<a...@jps.net> wrote:
> I am a lapsed Mensa member from 25 years ago. What should I do?
> Fredy
Since jps.net seems to be in the US, you'll want to visit
http://www.us.mensa.org/local_groups/findgroup.php3 on the US Mensa site.
Find your local group, and check them out! If you remember anything about
people from Mensa, they like to experience, they like to discuss, and they
like to eat. :)
Steve
Steve Levinthal
"Jerry Hollombe" <poly...@pacbell.net> wrote:
> Steve Levinthal <slevi...@chicago.us.mensa.org> wrote in
> news:BA562316.A3C1%slevi...@chicago.us.mensa.org:
>
>> Just soliciting opinions here... what, if any limit do you think we
>> should put on message size/file-attach sizes that get sent to a vanity
>> address?
>
> Either no limit or a mechanism for bypassing it once in a while.
Well, a lot of mailboxes still have a per-item size limit. No reason why we
should accept files that are larger than those limits if they're just going
to get rejected downstream anyway.
> I also suggest spam filtering.
Some would disagree, depending on the kind of filter, although I'm not one
of them. On other systems, I run at least ordb.org as a DNS based
blocklist, and on my personal systems, I also run spamcop.
Only recently did someone point me to Paul Graham's work with Bayesian
filters. Read a copy of his article "A Plan for Spam" at
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html. It's a brilliantly simple approach to
the problem of identifying spam, and it's a good read for anyone
inquisitive.
Steve
Vince
> It will still be required of members who signed up via the web.
Thanks. I love straightforward answers.
<snip>
> Just soliciting opinions here... what, if any limit do you think we
> should put on message size/file-attach sizes that get sent to a vanity
> address?
>
> Steve
Speaking for myself, Assuming:
1) We are talking at least a T1 or better (and no independent "bandwidth
charges",
2) People will be cluefull enough to not use it to spam, 3) People will be
cluefull enough to not use it as the address for a large business, and
(most importantly)
4) The server doesn't cache the messages (best), or flushes them very
regularly...
I wouldn't set a limit. If I had to set a limit, I would set it "absurdly"
high, 10+ Meg/message, etc.
Speaking only from my experience w/ the ARRL vanity address, it seems to
work fine w/o caps. It's a nice service that people like, and the more
transparent the better.
Having said that, I probably won't qualify for one if a few months.
Hugo Nebel
>You think so? How come I get so much spam to my @us.mensa.org
>addresses?
Maybe, because you have no 'Reply To: ' line in your header!
Spammers, harvesting addresses from newsgroups, extremely seldom load
the entire posting, just the short type header, and there is only the
'From: ' line, but not the 'Reply To: ' line.
And my 'Reply To: ' line contains an address, I regularly collect my
mails from, and there is very seldom spam.
My 'From: ' line is valid as well, but points to a spam collecting
mail account, which I only occasionally visit, for monitoring the
actual spam traffic, and sometimes to participate in the war against
spam terrorism.
E.g. to complain to their mail admins in the case of extremely stupid
spammers - but most fake these header lines anyhow, or to seek the
assistance of some web sites, who collect and analyse the headers to
find appropriate means, as publishing IP address ranges of open relays
in lists, which are then used by many mail admins, to either block
these IP ranges, or to catch the spammers on the spot, e.g. with the
'teergrube' method.
Another method avoiding spam is used by one of my ISPs (arcor.de):
there they offer mail addresses which are changed every month, for to
be used in usenet newsgroups, where most address harvesting programs
get their addresses from, which are sold then to spammers.
But so they do as well with all machine legible addresses on web
sites, and there the problem is more complicated, but there are
methods as well (it was just recently discussed in the M-Webheads
list).
I myself get very little spam on all my mail accounts, except the one
I specifically set up for that type of mails.
Hugo
Joseph
management understanding and support. Having been in similar positions
i can see this. It is also obvious to me that the "bloggers" and
similar folk have never found usenet news let alone listservs.
Ignorance
of history dooms one to relearn its lessons.
Joseph
'netter since early 80's
Steve Levinthal
You and I came from the same time and sets of experiences. In this day and
age, how many people do you know who call Ward Christensen a friend, much
less know who he is or what he's done?
Back in the early/mid-80s, 640K was all a computer would EVER need, real
computers didn't use mice, and color on a computer was just for people who
played games.
Times change, Joseph. To be honest, I've always had a love/hate feeling for
Usenet. Sure, it has great information, but it's also a haven for
crackpots, rude and insensitive people, and general social misfits, all
under the guise of "free" communication.
Don't get me wrong. I can flame with the best of them. But I've also
learned that I don't have to find direct (or creative) ways to get my point
across and make someone feel like an idiot in the process. It's so much
more challenging to do all that and have them come away liking you for it.
There are members of Mensa who have heard of Usenet's reputation have stayed
away. If we can better serve our membership by getting them more involved,
and it costs a handful of non-members the ability to use a news reader,
that's a fair trade.
So, while I thank you for your assessment of my good intentions, understand
that there's over 20 years of electronic communications experience behind it
too.
Steve
On 1/28/03 11:33 PM, in article 3E3766D9...@bigvalley.net, "Joseph"