administrivia: bmw digest archives, spam, thoughts about the past

[Richard Welty <rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

one of the things i'm doing now that the archives are being whipped into
shape is going through them (a little bit at a time) and removing spam
messages. the ftp'able digest issues will remain unchanged as an accurate
historical record, but i can't see any reason why the junk email needs to
be in the searchable web archives.

while i was going through the 1998 postings (in web archive v7), i was kind
of bemused by the state of affairs at that time.

v7 (ftp archive v9) represents the point where i'd finally moved the digest
onto its own dedicated hardware. prior to that, we'd been using majordomo
1.93 on wizvax's system; i couldn't get them to upgrade to 1.94 in a timely
manner, and there were critical features (like subscription confirmation)
that were becoming really important.

the balkanization hadn't yet occured; the UUC folks were just starting
their business and using the digest to launch it. they had offered (in
private email) to buy an ad in order to render their use of the digest
legitimate; i had accepted their offer in a private reply, but i never
got around to invoicing them before the great split occurred.

i'd just gotten to the point where i'd had enough of "Hot Rodd" Sidney,
after an extended and fruitless effort to try and get him to behave
responsibly.

v7 seems remarkably light on spam; the newly introduced spam control on
the server seems to have been working ok. sometime in a month or two i'll
rebuild v6 (the last wizvax volume) and we'll see if the spam rate is any
higher (i suspect it will be). at some point as i push back in time i'll
start running into Krazy Kevin spew (how many of you remember the female
students selling discount magazine subscriptions on the order of 10 years
ago? that was Kevin Lipshitz of Staten Island; his scheme was fundamentally
fradulent as well as spam, and he spent some quality time as a guest of the
state of new york at one point.)

if anyone going through the rebuilt archives (web v7/8/9) sees a spam
message, email me the url for the message in question, and i'll review it
and remove it if it's appropriate to do so. i've cleaned out the first 2000
or so messages in v7, but there's a lot more to go.

as i rebuild, i do so with <spammode> turned on; this means that email
addresses will be excised to prevent spammers from harvesting. i'm sure we
can all live with that.

cheers,
  richard
--
Richard Welty                                         rwelty@domain.elided
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
              Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
--
to be removed from bmw, see /bin/digest-subs.cgi
or email "unsubscribe bmw" to majordomo@domain.elided