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For what it's worth, I completely agree that throttling messages automatically is rotten, for all the reasons mentioned -- the issues of forgery/DoS, new-account workarounds, and the general icky territory of babysitting listers. I believe my previous post was too narrow in it's scope; only considering the mechanical aspects of the issue, not the larger world of whether it'd even be a Good Thing(tm).
Charlie --
(To continue looking at the gearhead side of the question ;-) Yeah, I was imagining a database approach. A simple berkely db file would work ok for this. (FWIW, an interesting spin-off of this idea might be a package which generated a set of list/poster statistics.) And IMHO the topic is not entirely outside the charter if this list; it speaks to the reasoning behind not creating such a feature. With a little luck, this WON'T become a faq. %-/
David --
The idea of forgery did come immediately to mind, and it's good you brought it up, if only to help convince folks to put this idea to rest. I joined this thread mainly because it seemed like an possibly interesting hack, and by no means impossible.
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If anyone *does* still think this is a good idea, then this is their next stop: http://www.hartzler.net/smartlist/SmartList-FAQ.html#Section_4.4
Regards,
Pete.
[massive snippage ahead]
On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Charlie Summers wrote:
... it would be faster/less intensive to maintain a database of posters/numbers ... I take that person aside and suggest they cool off a little. ... But _that_ is outside the discussion of SmartList ...
On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, David W. Tamkin wrote:
... But it would be such an invitation to forgery. ... Software is too easy to fool. Only a human moderator can administer a posting quota.