Tim, > On Apr 22, 2025, at 1:26 PM, 924 GTR <t@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Let's call it what it is. John Levine's weekly email summary is best described as surveillance. Yes, surveillance is the right word here. I agree that it's surveillance. The word itself isn't inherently bad. Perhaps you might think that's the case. > And if this weekly summary is so useful to people, I would be interested to see some examples of how they put it to use. Obtaining information is not a use. If you're in the "gathering data is bad" category of being bothered by surveillance, minimally it's a very light public reminder that people regularly mine and analyze list traffic. They've done so for years. Many of us run our own tooling to do so. Prior to the more automated forms of these reports, I'd sometimes to frequency analysis on various mail lists, IETF or not, for my own reasons. What do I find useful about this form of report? A few personal examples. Your mileage may vary. The ietf@ list is a noisy cess pool for me, and I generally don't pay strong attention to it for that reason. I may pay more attention if specific individuals are active that week. The general frequency count of total messages vs. individuals of interest will sometimes draw my attention in terms of "discussion has gotten hot". Not covered in the report and things I've done with my own tooling: - What thread is getting a lot of attention. - What is the branch pattern for the thread? + This often tells me if it's a productive conversation. + I particularly look at some interactions and determine they're likely toxic noise without even needing to look at the contents just based on the pattern. Outside of IETF, I've sometimes used a combination of both my own practices and simple frequency analysis to populate my /dev/null list. I never quite got around to teaching procmail how to recognize that a given thread had been driven to toxicity by participation by known problematic individuals. Within the IETF, since I mostly don't have the option to simply plonk individuals that harsh my mellow, I tend to rely on the above types of trending for "this thread likely has value". Within the point of discussion about dealing with problematic individuals, this type of analysis is likely of use to the moderation team. -- Jeff
