GETTING SERIOUS INDEED! (mailing list archives)

[Hank Leininger]

On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Aunt Sally wrote:

> What you have not heard is that I found myself on his blocking list
> after 15 - 20 clicks in KDE-Cygwin list archive. Just ordinary
> navigation...

Which looked a lot like robot traffic.

> And I have not said his logs are "bogus"

Sure you have.  In a previous mail I sent you a log of ~50 requests from
you in a 3-4 minute period, which included several occurances of the same
request being sent 2-4 times, and/or 2-5 requests at the same second,
and also clearly showed the server response time growing uncomfortably
long at the same time.  Your reply was:

> Multiple requests per second for several minutes? HA!
>
> Get real.

That sounds to me like simple dismissal of the logs I sent.  Not a
refutation that the conclusion drawn from them was incorrect (which
seems to be the case), but simply not acknowledging them as fact.

> I have called his blocking system "buggy". I have not told him to
> remove it, instead, I have told him to fix it.

Would you like fries with that?

> Because he sure as heck isn't bent on fixing his problems.

In fact I am, and I was perfectly willing to admit there might have been
a problem.  To quote myself:

> Indeed, the blocking system could be better in lots of ways.  So could
> the rest of MARC.  I appreciate constructive criticism.
>
> Did you look at the logs I included?  Do you believe that I made them up
> out of thin air?  I don't know about you but I haven't that kind of
> time.  Now, perhaps it was a "misdiagnosis" -- maybe other things were
> contributing to a load spike, and you were most active at the time so it
> looked like it was you, or you were hitting stop/reload so multiple
> queries were backing up, or your browser was not caching anything so
> reloading each time you hit back/forward, or you double-clicking some
> things, etc.  I'm certainly willing to admit that that might have
> happened.  But in that case a "Why am I getting this error, I'm not a
> robot?!" mail would have sufficed.

Back to you:

> That however is only a short term fix, as you will be blocked again
> next time you browse at lists.kde.org.

Actually, no.  As I told you earlier, you did indeed find a bug in the
robot-blocker; it should not have let you back in at all, because you
were still on the list.

Back to you:

> I would be most grateful if anyone could point me to a more stable
> archive provider.

I've already told you, all(?) KDE lists are available via pipermail
archives and/or raw mailspools at mail.kde.org.  Start at
http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/ and follow the link for any list
to find alternate (in fact, authoritative) archives for it.

> It seems that my previous mail has ended up on the kde-www list. I
> don't know how that happened...

I believe that webmaster at kde.org mail is sent to the kde-www list.

> Well, Hank, you can keep this little village blocked.

Thanks, but no need.  It's never been my policy to block people whom I
find offensive, who have some sense of entitlement, and who jump to
conclusions of persecution.  I only block robots/sites/users who
negatively impact the ability of the site to serve everyone else (well,
and known spam address harvesters/software, when possible).  So I've
removed the robot-list entry for your address range.  You're not
welcome.

And congratulations, you've used up several hours of my free time this
weekend that I could have spend responding to requests to add lists,
adding features and, yes, bug fixes to the site.  Maybe I should have
kept you on the blocked list (and added a killfile entry) after all...


Hank Leininger <hlein at progressive-comp.com>
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