At 18:44 24-10-2002 -0700, Nick Arnett wrote:
I am wholeheartedly opposed to all this, for various reasons.To do real-world tests of dinging, someone has to ding (the dinger) someone else (the dingee). The dinger's messages slow down somewhat, the dingee's messages slow down more. Then we see what happens to the discussion. At the moment, I'm really only look at the effects on the dingee, since one dinger would have to ding a bunch of dingees before the effect would become very noticeable. And as long as this is manual management, it doesn't scale well.
First, we were not informed beforehand that this testing was going to take place. So, when people noticed that their messages took a long time to get through, they had no way of determining the reason for the delay. Was there something wrong with their computer? Was there something wrong with their internet connection? Did their ISP have technical problems? This problem will resurface once the dinging system becomes fully operational.
Second, you did not ask permission from members to use their posts for your tests. Before disrupting someone's postings to the list, you should at least have informed them about what was about to happen, and preferably ask their permission first.
Third, if someone's posts in one thread are coming through immediately, but posts in an other thread are delayed because of the dinging, it will give the impression that the poster is unwilling to reply to messages in that thread. Suppose I ask poster X a question about a comment he made in a certain thread; I then see him posting in other threads, but I do not see him replying to my question. That would leave the impression that he has no intention of answering the question. Now, with John Giorgis I *know* he is not going to answer my questions, but I know most other posters would try to give an answer. The dinging system would only make them look bad, while that impression would be unwarranted. That is not exactly going to improve the overall atmosphere on this list.
So, get somebody to ding you. Once you're dung, we can test. Offending *me* or Julia won't do it, because I'm a tester, not a testee. Offend somebody else.
Can I pick *anyone* I want (excepting you and Julia)? <EVIL GRIN>
This is Real Bad too. To make this somewhat on-topic: it lacks transparency. If someone wants to disrupt my posting of messages, I want to know who is doing it.Oh, and just as it will be when automated, the identities of dingers and dingees are not shown, but the alert reader can probably detect dingage by looking at headers.
Also, this anonimity makes it very easy to abuse the dinging system. Someone who posts very few messages could seriously disrupt someone else's posting (by dinging that person over and over again) while barely feeling the consequences (having their own posts delayed). A person could even be quite disruptive without feeling the consequences at all, simply by posting from one address and setting up a second address for dinging only.
And finally, this whole dinging system in the setup you describe sounds to me like a first step towards this list becoming a moderated list.
Jeroen "Shields up! Red alert!" van Baardwijk
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