On Jun 5, 2009, at 3:54 AM, William Beaty wrote:
Perhaps the group needs to come up with an actual rule to describe the acceptible amount of politics/religion messages here? Normally the complaints from other group members would give warning enough.
My opinion is that things have worked OK here for years - the rule of thumb apparently being that everything goes until people complain. This is a pretty tolerant group, so I think it has worked out fairly well with regards to the number of complaints to handle. A lot less irrelevant gab, political or otherwise, seems to go on when important scientific reports are being discussed, so that seems to have worked out OK.
One problem is the case where the primary or even single purpose of a subscriber is not scientific discussion, but rather some non- scientific agenda, advertising, or trolling, and it is accomplished at a high posting rate. Long term contributers of scientific discussion here are typically tolerated more than newcomers, or those who contribute almost nothing scientific whatsoever, when it comes to off topic posts or minor rule infractions, and that seems fair to me. This is another reason that leaving things alone unless there are complaints has worked out fairly well.
Another problem is when a large signature block containing advertising or agendas is used repetitively, and posting a few short vaguely relevant comments many times a week can be construed as a bald faced advertising or trolling scheme on that basis alone.
Also, responding with a sentence or two to large posts and not cutting most of the quoted material is an offense to the existing rules that many of us tend to make. I wonder if most current subscribers even know about that rule.
Again, it seems to me the rules are good, we just have to follow them, and complain if things get too far out of hand.
Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
