[TheForge] [META] Re: Blog site..teetering towards OT

[Mike]

Lynne> Opening the mail from this site is becoming a waste time.  It's
Lynne> sad.

Um, Do you mean by "this site" the entity accessed by sending mail to
TheForge at mailman.qth.net?

TheForge is not a web log or "blog", it's a "mailing list", a
mechanism and term that's been around since before the net went
public.

The mail you get is not from a "site", it's from a very heterogeneous
mix of people who share a common interest and who are or might be your
friends.

When you chat with your friends in informal circumstances, you never
adhere rigidly to an agenda.  Unmoderated mailing lists are like
informal chats with your friends.  TheForge is an unmoderated mailing
list.  Some of your existing or potential friends are more frivolous
or mouthy than others.  But TheForge is people chatting, not a "site"
that periodically emits text, and you get the usual characteristics of
people chatting.

Moderated mailing lists are different.  The moderator vets every post
for compliance with publicly stated criteria.  Posts which fail the
test are discarded or returned to sender.  Subscribers who post
noncompliant messages may be reprimanded or barred from posting.  A
moderated mailing list is more like an employer's departmental
meeting, a management session at a trade organization or a university
seminar.

In either case -- moderated or unmoderated -- there is a "list owner"
who has access to the mail server and control of the subscriber list.
The list owner is ghod, ad hoc and pro tem. His or her word is the
last word.  Our list owner has indeed requested that off-topic posts
be limited.  He's within his rights, under the usual rubric for
electronic mailing lists, if he simply unsubscribes -- bars -- users
who post off topic.  Hitherto he has been rather flexible and
forgiving in this regard.

Even with my humble dialup connection to the net, I don't find it a
big chore to scan over and delete nattering that I find
uninteresting.  This would not be the case if we were discussing n
issue that attracted thousands of posts daily or even weekly.  But
we're a relatively low traffic list.  I'm content, to date, with the
flexible attitude of the list owner and not much inconvenienced by
episodes of OT nattering.  Your viewpoint may differ.

CS> Believe it or not, I have better things to do than read this list
CS> all day, but not many things I enjoy as much, no matter the topic.

Yeah. what he said.

FWIW,
- Mike



    Technical footnote:

    The subject flag [META] is widely used to flag posts which deal
    with the list itself rather than the accepted subject or topic of
    the list, in the same way that [LISTNAME] is used to flag mail
    from a particular list or [OT] to flag off-topic posts.

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^