Jon said: > Do you have any suggestions?
If I had them, I would've made them by now. > How does the Culture list manage to avoid these problems? One unusual thing about the Culture list is that it doesn't have a resident listowner. Dan Polivy owns the machine on which the list runs but he hasn't been a subscriber for many years and very few of the list's subscribers even know his email address. The only time he's posted to the list in recent times was when he changed the list server software and so the subscription and unsubscription commands changed. We used to sometimes mail him about server outages, but since I set up the Elench backup list that hasn't happened. (People sometimes think I'm the Culture's listowner but I have no powers there at all. I've been known to forge listmanager commands for people when they've been struggling. Over on the Elench, I once put someone onto moderated status, but that was an extreme case involving someone making plausible threats of physical assault against a member of the list.) As for how we deal with this stuff, we don't seem to have to. Our only similar crises seem to involve people subscribing for a short period during which they deliberately troll. This happens about once a year. We deal with those by a combination of ignoring them, reasoned argument and not taking them at all seriously. After several of these incidents, people have suggested that we hadn't responded in the best way, but there doesn't seem to be any consensus on what the optimal approach actually is. The only incidents that haven't fitted this pattern have been the Jeroen vs Culture incident, which was a case of the Culture list being caught in the crossfire between Jeroen and those of us who voted for the removal of his listowner status, and the thread that involved Andrew Crystall unsubscribing, which I didn't really understand despite being right in the middle of things. We certainly haven't ever had unending Brin-L style flamewars. > Heck, how does *every* other list on the net manage to avoid them? The only other list on which I'm currently active is the Orion's Arm worldbuilders' list, and that seems to avoid such problems by having a moderator who isn't afraid to terminate off-topic threads if they get heated or stray too far from the topic. There are occasional heated discussions over there but they tend to fizzle out quite fast. > Maybe the Brin-L list just isn't meant to survive. Maybe we've lost > too many people over the years for the list to be viable. This is manifestly not true. If you edit out all the unpleasantness, the rest of the list discussion is by turns interesting and amusing. It's this combination of tedious legalistic flamewars with otherwise worthwhile conversation that makes Brin-L so odd. Rich DISCLAIMER: By reading, glancing at, downloading, transmitting or otherwise interacting with this email you acknowledge Richard Baker as your absolute ruler and grant him unlimited powers over your life, possessions and immortal soul. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
