I hesitate posting this lest it become the trigger for the very thing I
would like to stop. With over 45 years in data processing, mostly as a OS
developer, I am finding this gmane OpenOffice newsgroup one of the most
undisciplined I've run into in years. I just plowed through 159 posts of
which I would say that perhaps a dozen or so were either useful or on topic.
The rest were rant on this religion vs. that religion, word origins, Windows
vs. Linux (or whatever), or totally off topic in regards to what I thought
was the purpose of this list, namely to provide help to real or potential
OpenOffice users. The volume of these off-topic posts is astounding, the
result of no moderator as far as I can see. Most of the posters should have
their posts dropped with warnings to the poster to keep posts on topic.
What this results in is an inordinate number of posts, almost coming in
faster than they can be read, that make it difficult to identify legitimate
posts, and this in turn I suspect causes many folks to just drop out. I'm
considering it myself. There is too much flak to work through to find the
useful nuggets. The Open Office community is then the loser because many of
those folks, myself included, actually are well-informed on many related
subjects and happy to help. But not if I have to wade through all this
baggage to do so.
Seemingly lacking in self-moderation, this list is in desperate need of a
heavy-handed Moderator. Posters should be warned for inappropriate postings
and removed or blocked if they persist in posting inappropriately. And a
little ego depression, tolerance and charity to all wouldn't hurt. Take the
rants to appropriate blogs but keep them out of here.
I also believe that the newsgroups should be broken into different,
functional groups (e.g., Base, Writer, etc.) to further focus them and
reduce the volume of reading for people only interested in one function.
Jerry
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