[LA-Policies] Mailing list policy comments

[Russell Stuart]

On Thu, 2014-10-30 at 14:39 +1030, Glen Turner wrote:
> To be clear, I don't suggest removing all offensive material, but that 
> list administrators be empowered to immediately remove *some* offensive 
> material from the archive, using their discretion and their knowledge of 
> the laws of defamation, decency and discrimination. Material determined to 
> be unnecessarily removed can always be returned to the archive.

Yeah, well I guess that's what I am disagreeing with.  Your
qualification "if they think ...." doesn't add anything beyond guidance,
as people can think up some pretty odd things to justify their actions
in the heat of the moment.  So effectively this becomes "the moderators
are allowed to remove any post at their absolute discretion".

I am not not saying no post should be removed.  But the minimum trigger
should be a receiving a complaint.  The complaint is effectively a take
down request and LA should treat it with the same seriousness and due
diligence as any other take down request.

Yes, this all gets too clumsy and slow if the review process is
effectively being DDOS'ed by some troll or spam.  Debian gets around
that making them special cases allowing immediate action.  The special
cases allowing immediate action are "posts by a sock puppet of a banned
person" and "off topic spam".

I don't think what I am suggesting new.  From what I can tell LA
approached recent problems with a similar process involving possible
courses of action being discussed by the Exec, and there was a good
outcome.  What you are proposing - a single person erasing the
contributions of a person without consultation would be a new way of
running LA, or at least I hope it is.