For the record, some things were fixed in gmane very recently, most notably the autoauthorizer which has you respond to a confirmation e-mail when you post a mailing-list mirror (such as gmane.comp.python.devel which is the python-dev NNTP mirror provided by GMane) for the first time. More details were posted by the admins on gmane.discuss for those interested.
(the Web site is still mostly off, though)