I'm crossposting this to my both my Blogspot and my LJ blog , to make sure as many people read this as possible.
I'm on a *lot* of Yahoogroups email lists. Most of them are no problem, other than the usual YG 'glitches' that occur on a frequent basis.
This rant is about the 'absentee' YG list owners. People who start a list and either forget about it, or think the list will 'run itself' and lets anyone and everyone join, without setting the list to 'moderated for new members'. This allows spammers to join the list and post their trash. If the owners stopped it from happening, that would be one thing, but I'm on more than a couple where the same people (or people with *very* similar email addresses) send the same things over and over again - and the list owner apparently isn't paying enough attention to see it, is gone, or has forgotten all about the list (maybe even changed their email address and *their* email is even bouncing), or simply doesn't have the time to properly run the list.
One *very* easy solution: appoint moderators. If you're going to start a list, and it becomes more than you can handle on your own, check around with others on the list, see if one or two of them are willing to help you moderate it - help keep an eye on the member requests, the messages, spam. Then you won't have to spend so much time on it yourself.
As a list owner myself, I always set my lists to either have me approve members before joining so I can 'vet' the address against a recognized list of spam email accounts and/or set new members to moderation, meaning that I have to approve their messages until I know they're really on the list for a legitimate reason. If they send spam in their first message, they're removed from the list and their email address banned.
I know that if someone slips through the cracks on my lists, I jump on the matter immediately, I don't wait for ten more similar emails to get through to my membership before I act.
It's something that anyone can do - even someone who's busy and can't attend to a list every day. But people should know that running even *one* list takes time. Even a little time every few days or once a week for a low-traffic list. I've seen too many AWOL owners the last few weeks. Owners that you send a spam email that came over *their* list back to, and never hear from - or the email bounces back to you for some reason.
There should be a way for people do 'adopt' a list that's been basically abandoned. Or a way to turn them over to Yahoogroups so that they can delete them if they *have* been abandoned. I know that if a list doesn't have any new messages for a length of time, YG will delete it after a warning to the owner, but these lists aren't going to be eligible for that, since the spammers are sending messages, keeping the list 'alive' in the Yahoogroups database.
The only option that anyone has now is to simply choose to unsubscribe from these lists and to let the list know *why* they are leaving - because the list owner was too busy or uncaring to take care of the list and prevent the spammers from taking it over.
Agree? Disagree? I'd like to hear from you, and from some of these AWOL Yahoogroups list owners as well, if you're out there.
