Hi,

Daily, my mailbox is bombarded with mails reminding me to moderate mailing list traffic on common-lisp.net. On occasion I have acted on these messages, if I saw one come by where genuine traffic was held. Most of the time, they are mails trying to sell eBikes and other junk, though. While I haven't acted much on them, they do present distraction, both of genuine mail traffic as well as in my mind. I want to remove that distraction.

Out of curiosity, I picked the last reminder I received this morning. It was from cells-devel@ . There are no moderators, which means that reminders go to the owners: Kenny Tilton and cl-net root@ (that is: Mark Evenson, Dave Cooper, Philipp Marek and me).

There is a list of 333 moderations waiting. Accumulated between August 2024 and today. Actual list traffic: 1 mail in 2020 (without response!) and the last one before that was from 2012.

The before-last reminder was to cffi-devel@. There 113 moderations are waiting. Last and before-last active mail threads (including replies) are from 2023 and 2021 respectively. Owner of the list are Luis Oliveira and root@; again, no moderators.  Conclusion: Although not as bad as with cells, nobody is acting on these reminders for cffi-devel either.

The one before that: cl-opengl-devel@. Same story: 95 waiting moderations, most recent mail threads from 2022 and 2020.

So, I see the following options (other than adding mail filters which simply delete these things on my side):

2. Copy the owners - excluding root@ - to the moderators so the flow to root@ stops

3. Forcibly set mailing lists to drop non-member posts - the current default seems to be to hold for moderation

Additionally, we could archive (remove submission possibility) for mailing lists which haven't received a single post for more than 5(?) or 7(?) or ... years.

I'm looking for the best way forward for common-lisp.net here, not for my personal mailbox. What do you say?