It has been a long time since I was involved in the W3C, but I can tell you that the public lists are plagued with clueless people who jump onto, e.g., the XHTML 2.0 standards definition list and ask for help with converting their BMPs into GIFs for their homepage. Even without those, there are legions of self-important blowhards who will spend weeks arguing whether "<section>" is the semantically best name for a tag.
W3C is not terribly quick at getting things done at the best of times, but the public lists are even more so.
All that said, I've never heard of a "hold" before, but then I was only ever on the public lists.
I agree that allowing users to post to the lists might be harmful in some cases, but I can't think of a good reason why these lists aren't readable by the public.
W3C is not terribly quick at getting things done at the best of times, but the public lists are even more so.
All that said, I've never heard of a "hold" before, but then I was only ever on the public lists.