Justin Bengtson wrote: > who drops offenders? what is considered a huge enough offense to drop > someone from the list? what is considered "appropriate" behavior? would > the list admin even CONSIDER dropping such favorites as Seth, Patrick, KBob, > or any of the other long-time subscribees for inappropriate behavior? (no > offense given, it's just an example. i would hate to see them leave.) > > if i express an opinion or share a life experience and am later shot down, > flamed, whatever, because what i am talking about/promoting is basically > anathema, or perceived of as, to our *nix community, who is using the > in-appropriate behavior?
I'm not sure whether these questions are rhetorical or you want an answer. But I think the answer, in any case, is, "It depends." Rather than try to preformulate a policy document for acceptable use of the mailing list that covers all hypothetical cases, let's play it by ear. That will work for the simple reason that most of us want to be reasonable people most of the time. If we manage to recruit a bona-fide asshole, or we get two perfectly reasonable people who hate each other passionately and can't control themselves, then we'll need to decide what to do in that particular circumstance. In the meantime, we can all just get along.* In engineering terms, we have lazy evaluation of our list policy. (-: Since I've already gotten longwinded, and nobody is still reading me, here's my take on mailing lists/newsgroups/etc. The two mailing list thing is not working. It's like being at a party where the host told you, "Go into the other room if you're going to discuss politics." It doesn't happen. People talk, and politics come up, and nobody interrupts and says, "We have to go to the other room now," or if they do, they're ignored. We're friends. We talk about what interests us. Linux brings us together, but then we digress. OTOH, list members have already complained when long threads go off topic. I don't have a good answer for those who wish this list had lower volume. But I *would* like to see a eug-lug-announce mailing list. It would only contain announcements of meetings and the like, and would probably be moderated. That list would be for the people who don't want to join the general conversation but do want to know what EUGLUG is doing. Sorry, Patrick, but IMO netnews is dead and smelly, and nothing but a spam haven. The fact that only six people used eug.comp.os.linux (sp?) is a strong indicator. * This paragraph will sound very familiar to Anarchists and Anarchist sympathizers. But I'm not going to put a label on it, not me! (-: -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
