[Ilugc] Re: eight steps to correct posting
- From: linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Suresh Ramasubramanian)
- Date: Thu Oct 25 22:20:38 2007
It is better if _someone_ does play list police; ideally
off-list, to get the message across, and yet not clutter up the list.
I have seen examples of aggressive + offlist list moderation .. the blug
lists, and then nanog (www.nanog.org), which was run for years by Susan
Harris from merit.edu, the org that operates nanog .. her policies caused a
near universal revolt, a special session at a nanog meeting and then the
formation of what was basically a mailing list committee chosen / elected by
the community.
And nanog typically has senior systems / network admins at tier 1s all the
way to small offices with a T1, rather than students sending sms-speak
email, so the challenge is more preventing topic drift than anything else.
By the way, nobody on nanog seems to bother flaming top / bottom posts,
posts in html, etc .. the prohibitions against that are a legacy of usenet,
and then of various *nix / geek type mailing lists. You grow out of trying
to enforce it on everybody, at least once you get to looking at the post's
content and topicity instead
Umm. This is not how most mailing lists and USENET groups
work -- they are governed by the charter, and by people sharing the
burden of meeting the charter. The people who created the mailing list
or group does not become a de-facto or de-jure god.
Like I said - usenet is a special case all by itself (and if you see the
other usenet groups around, not the comp.*, prog.* groups I mean.. even that
gets modified a bit).
As for "most" mailing lists - especially the large ones that aren't totally
geek oriented, they get a totally different set of priorities. You stop
trying to enforce posting styles, to start with ..
Are you suggesting we just silently ignore top posters and
people who do not know how to ask questions smartly[0]? I will
If you don't wish to answer a question on a mailing list, you are completely
free not to. Whether it is because you think your clue levels (admittedly
high clue levels) will be wasted on the guy because he top posts and appears
to have failed his sixth standard english exams, or because you don't agree
with him, or because he hasn't bothered to google even when the first link
would have brought him to the answer ..
It is a free country. Personally speaking, I would try to answer it. If at
all I can read the email and if I have the time to answer it / like the
question (I can't read tamil so that percentage of ilug* posts is more or
less a closed book for me)
srs
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