[IMC-DC] Emergency Editorial Meeting, today (thurs) 6/26 7pm

[Alan Bushnell]

Hi,

We had a concerted spam attack on our newswire tonight.  It seems to
have stopped for the time being but the spammer said that it would
reoccur and they have the power to do so.  A small group (4 people,
input from a 5th by phone) caucused and thought the best course of
action was to make a pretty radical change to the way our newswire works
following an emergency meeting.

That meeting will be today (thursday) 6/26, 7pm at the DC IMC space
(1426 9th St NW).  This overlaps w/ the scheduled video meeting, we got
some input from a video person that that would probably be ok and given
the seriousness of this we thought this was the best option.

here's a brief summary (please direct discussion to imc-dc-editorial)

- The spam was prompted by the hiding of posts related to a long running
disupute between two locals.  See recent editorial archives for details

http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-dc-editorial

- Dialog with the concerned parties was seen as extremely unlikely to
be productive, in large part due to the amount of hostility directed at
individuals so far 

- It is not technically feasible to prevent a spam attack on a nonprior
restraint publishing system like our current newswire

- This incident is just the latest installment of a long running episode
between two individuals, which is just a particularly bad chapter in a
whole book of use of the newswire for personal attacks, trolls, global
crossposts, etc, as opposed to, say, using media to empower the
community 

Given that as background, the course of action that the caucus thought
we should take for newswire articles to *not* appear on the front page
when they are published.  Instead they would be published as "hidden"
and editors would then promote articles that met some to be determined
criteria.  This solution is technically feasible with a fairly small
amount of work with our current software and would be on a provisional
basis only.

alan
-- 
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