On 10:10 AM 11/27/2001 -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>What do people think about this stuff? How do you manage it? Are you seeing
>the same trend I am, with people doing this more often? It seems to me
>there's some aspect of laziness here ("rather than find the right place,
>I'll ask the close place") but combined with the "know these guys are
>clueful" aspect, so there's a mixed message here. Definitely hard to decide
>where to draw the lines in the sand, so I thought I"d throw it out and see
>what others are thinking.
I'm on a lot of different horse topic discussion lists, including old and
established mailing lists, newer mailing lists, and a newsgroup. One of
the lists is eventers-l, an old and well established discussion list on the
fairly narrow topic of things pertaining to horses that compete in Combined
Training aka Eventing (see <http://www.eventingusa.com/> for more
information about this sport).
At some point the list manager started publicly (posting "to the list")
"slapping" people with a dead fish for off-topic posts. As a result,
people are a lot more careful to keep their posts on-topic, and when
veering off-topic (but not actually *going* off-topic, people are very
careful to have some sort of ObEventers in their post) they request their
favorite fish. It's been AGES since the list received any actual off-topic
posts. I'm not quite sure how this all came about, but it's been VERY
successful in keeping this list totally on-topic, even in these
"interesting times" when people seem unable to stick to on-topic posts on
all the other lists (especially the Yahoo! Groups lists).
I wonder if part of the reason this is so successful on Eventers-L is
because the sport itself isn't for wimps. You have to be a certain type of
person to want to do all 3 phases of Eventing, and if you have the drive
and focus to Event, you probably care more (than, say, the average AOLer or
WebTVer) about having a list that stays on-topic. I'm managing a list on
Natural Horsemanship, and I haven't been as successful at getting people to
*want* to stay on-topic on this list as they *want* to stay on-topic on the
Eventers list. Perhaps I need to haul out the fish. :-)
jc (if this were off-topic, I'd ask for salmon, please, with hollandaise)
