[TriLUG] Your message to TriLUG awaits moderator approval

[Aaron Schrab via TriLUG]

At 10:34 -0400 07 Jun 2018, Matt Flyer via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
>Let's ask a couple of practical questions.
>
>What is the purpose of the size limit?  Is it routinely stopping abuse
>or otherwise serving a real requirement?  Or is it an impediment to the
>legitimate mission of this list and organization?
>
>I have been bitten by the limit a couple of times when trying to
>discuss actual, technical topics pertinent to the list, on a couple,
>admittedly rare occasions.  In none of those occasions has the post
>ever been "approved"

As the person who has been making most of the moderation decisions 
recently, this surprises me.  In my recollection there haven't been many 
messages held for moderation based on the size restriction recently.  If 
the size limit is the only issue I will almost always approve the 
message. The only reason I can recall for not doing so is if I notice 
that a trimmed version was sent to the list before I get a chance to 
approve the original.

Often messages which hit the size limit due to attachments of types that 
the list software would remove before sending on. If the message would 
still make sense without the attachment I will typically approve it, 
otherwise I reject it with a request that the attachment be replaced by 
a link to the file hosted elsewhere.

>Perhaps it is time to reconsider this limit?

Even with the abomination that is HTML mail, it's quite rare for a 
message without prohibited attachments to exceed 20kB. The main cases 
where that happens is if somebody quotes an entire thread or digest.

In the past month (the extent of the relevant logs) there have been 2 
messages to this list which were held for moderator approval, both of 
those were from yesterday.  The one which resulted in this thread being 
started was approved essentially as soon as I saw the notice that a 
message was awaiting moderation.  The other message from that same 
thread included a PDF attachment (which wouldn't have made it through 
the list due to restrictions on allowed MIME Content-Types) so I 
rejected it; since IMO the message would have been nearly useless 
without the PDF (note: I do not intend this as a criticism of the 
sender).  Having the ability to make that call is, for me, the primary 
reason against increasing the size limit.

We could certainly loosen the restrictions on allowed types of content 
(probably along with increasing the size restriction). But many of the 
disallowed content types could contain malware. They also tend to have 
various accessibility issues, either based on the abilities of readers 
or of the software being used to read the messages. For instance, my 
main method of consuming this list is running mutt on a remote system; 
so any non-text content will generally be ignored.
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