Do you have 15-30 minutes per week you can spare? Have you been observing this community for a while and have gained a strong mental map of names of community participants and projects? If so then we need you.
The Announcements list is a major spam magnet. Just as a rough guess I would say we receive on the order of 1000 spam per each valid submission. The list is fully moderated and to keep up with this volume of spam the list has to be moderated regularly.
If you accepted this job you would:
1. Start receiving far more spam in the form of announcements list moderation requests. The spam would be in the form of attachment to each request and the emails themselves have a standard format, so would be easy to filter out.
2. Carefully look through the announcement moderation requests at each opportunity (hopefully at least once a day) looking for valid submissions. Realistically you can just scan the subjects which include the email address of the submitter. In all likelihood you will recognize an email address for a valid submission and then look at the message itself to confirm.
All list moderators would get all messages and so missing one is no great problem as one of the other moderators would probably catch it. If you find a valid submission you would login to the moderation interface (web-based) and search for and accept only that submission, leaving the rest of the moderation queue.
3. Once or twice a week (schedule to be determined and depends on number of volunteers) you would scan through the entire moderation queue for valid messages. In this case the easiest information to spot is the subject and so you would be looking for names of projects and relevant keywords. Mark each valid submission (if any) and then submit the entire moderation queue having all the spam deleted automatically.
This is a largely thankless and annoying job. Very few announcements are sent to the announcements list yet. I wish I knew why and what to do about it. All I know to do at this point is be patient, and I'm asking you to assist me in this and cut down on the volume of messages I have to scan.
Thank you,
Ken Causey