A good mailing list / BBS / forum / whatever has a benevolent dictator.
A moderator. Someone who rules with a light hand, and who has the time
and good nature to police unruly threads. A simple solution is to reject
the person's message, but this requires human intervention.
It's usually pretty easy to shift these mail lists from automatic
to moderated, but then there's a posting delay as the moderator
approves messages... and I think it's too much to ask for someone
to volunteer 10+ hours a week to trim and approve postings.
I've always thought a much more sensible approach is the private
news server. It allows pruning of unruly threads, either by the
reader (ignoring off-topic subjects) or by a B.D. who trims
away junk messages. It allows auto-archiving. It doesn't clog
mail routes and mail boxes. You can read it with any Usenet news reader,
just point to someone else's server. It would be easy to split
into .hardware, .software, .culture sub-groups.
Wirehead Prime <wirehead_at_retrocomputing.com> wrote:
>2. Who's fault is it that you've apparently never learned to use a
>delete key?
Uhm, so why did you decide it was useful to include a quoted
copy of Sam's post? Excess bytes vex me more than swear words, but
almost as much as conspiracy theories.
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <
http://www.threedee.com/jcm>
Received on Wed Mar 18 1998 - 09:23:00 GMT