To answer a few questions so far:
An "established" member is simply someone who has
posted before. The Vocalist is set so that anyone's
very first post has to be approved by me before it
goes to the list ("unmoderated list, moderate new
members" option in yahoogroups). This is how I catch
the porno spam and the like; I simply delete it and
throw the sender off the list. Normal messages get
approved and then that person can send to the list
normally. So voting to ban spam from
"non-established" members simply means that someone
couldn't sign up and post a commercial post as their
first (and usually last) message.
Theoretically, someone could sign up, post a vocal
message, and then post some bestiality spam, and it
would slip through the cracks; this has yet to happen,
though, so as a spam-catching system it works pretty
well. There's no way to auto-filter anything with
yahoogroups; it's all me. So filtering it into the
Files section of the website would be hard to do
(unless we set the whole list to manual moderation,
which no one wants to do, least of all me).
In the US, ISP service is flat-rate; however, it is my
understanding that it's basically impossible to get an
unlimited phone rate system in many European
countries; you pay per minute of sign-on time to your
phone company, and often you pay your ISP for your
bandwidth as well. Vocalist has a not-insubstantial
wedge of European subscribers, which is why I keep
trying to get people to stop quoting an entire digest
in their replies, and the like.
Yet another unsavory aspect of yahoogroups is that you
must go through the registering hooplah before you can
access the website (you can sign up for an email list
without registering). If you don't want to do this
(which I understand), you can send me your vote via
email and I'll tally it in.
Sorry for those who don't like the discussion -- I
figured I'd rather get everyone's input before making
a decision about list policy (like what kind of
soliciting is okay and what kind isn't okay), being
the pseudo-democratic list that we are.
Isabelle B.
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