[alac] Why there are chronic delays on mail to the ICANN ALAC list
Kent introduced them deliberately, because he thinks they're good for us. No, I am not making this up. Regards, John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 07:35:09 -0700 From: kent <kent@xxxxxxxxx> To: John L <johnl@xxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: [alac-admin] Re: E-mail spam alert... On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 12:54:09AM -0400, John L wrote: greylist-milter. The milter does whitelist addresses, but we have 4 round-robin mail gateways, and there isn't a global whitelist database. Frequent correspondents don't get delayed much, since they usually hit all 4 gateways within the whitelist decay -- I make it pretty long to help that.
One of ICANN's fundamental goals is to collect reasoned opinions. One of the longest standing complaints about ICANN's email lists has been that they fostered mindless back and forth rather than thoughtful comments. ICANN has tried a number different approaches. We used straight email lists for a while -- they degenerated into flamefests. We used a web-based comment forum for a while -- that was just as bad. We noticed that any highly interactive mechanism tends to foster back and forth ungoverned conversations with tendencies to go off in wild directions. Making things *less* interactive, as in the current comment forum mechanism, has been far more successful in collecting meaningful input. The alac seems to be a relatively polite bunch, but one could argue that's just a function of the current membership dynamics. So, when you say that the delays are a chronic problem, I would be interested to know precisely what you see that problem to be. I certainly agree that the delays may be chronic. But why is that a problem? Are there really occasions where a half hour delay is a serious issue?
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