Folks, The stats George posted are well worth thinking hard about.
When there are so many postings on a list in such a short time, the following is inevitable: - folks don't read them all anymore. I'm sure folks make decisions on which messages to delete unread based on their opinion of an individual poster's typical signal-to-noise ratio based on recent and past postings. In other words, if you want other people to read your postings (which I would assume is the point), less is often more. - postings are often no longer intended to better understand or tease out a better understanding of what the *real* issues and thinking are on an issue. They just become shouting matches. This helps no one (and indeed, tends to push folk away). - The purpose of the WG is to find consensus and a reasonable engineering result. One can't do that if folk are not listening or understanding each other. - it's one thing to understand someone else's view point, but disagree with it. This is a very reasonable thing to do. When this happens, its often good at some oint to simply agree to disagree and stop posting. - It's another to disagree with another viewpoint to the point that whenever it is mentioned (or even hinted at by someone) a long response containing an oft-repeated rant on a particular view point immediately happens. - I can't help but wonder if for some people, the more they post, the more they think they are influencing what is happening. This simply isn't the case in my experience, at least not in a positive sense. *What* one says, matters a lot more than how many times it is said or how loudly. Folks, please please please *think* before you post, reread what you post (before you post it), and ask yourself whether the posting actually sheds any light on the discussion, whether it should just be taken off line, or maybe simply not said at all. Thomas -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
