Jed, I believe you are missing the point. 1. Extra verbiage does not bother me, it's the clumsy mailing list format that's causing a lot of heartache. It sends you all the mail and it clogs my Internet pipe. (I don't have a fast pipe like you have.) The problem in not so much in the amount of threads, but rather in how the threads are delivered to you because of the Mailing List format. I have asked Bill to consider changing to a Forum Format to improve efficiency, but I am hitting a brick wall.
2. As mentioned, mail filtering based on "Off Topic" in the subject line is not very efffective, because it filters out the entire thread including all subsequent responses. Many times, an Off Topic thread does diverge into some very useful discussion. I do not want to filter because I do not want to miss anything. There are nuggets of gold in some off topic threads. (I can remember that LENR in Aircraft discussion that diverged and covered a lot of useful LENR information from Axil.) 3. This mailing list looses responses that does not show up in the Web interface, hence I am forced to review every response whether on topic or off topic. 4. Vortex-L is not for our personal agenda. Cluttering the list only serves to dilute its effectiveness as a useful resource. 5. The mailing list format is only effective if there are few users with more relevant post with a high S/N ratio. With more members comes more clutter with increasing difficulty in managing. A Forum Format would help alleviate many problems. Maybe you can help me prevail upon Bill to do this. Jojo ----- Original Message ----- From: Jed Rothwell To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, June 18, 2012 12:17 AM Subject: Re: [Vo]:OT: Please! Let's do our part and keep OFF-TOPIC off this list! Jojo Jaro <[email protected]> wrote: Surely you can agree that Wisconsin politics, school lunches, dead Everest Bodies and the like are completely inappropriate. (Although I did find Everest Dead Bodies Interesting to say the least.) I agree they are OFF TOPIC. They should be marked OFF TOPIC. With any modern e-mail reader it is easy to automatically delete all messages with this heading. If you do not wish to see these messages, take a moment to change your settings. I agree that if people want to introduce off-topic comments into a discussion, they should start a new thread with "OFF TOPIC" in the heading. Along the same lines, when the topic starts to drift, I would appreciate it if people would start a new thread with a new heading, on-topic or off. It is ridiculous that we have a technology that can solve most of the world's technological problems such as global warming but we are so inept we cannot even persuade Incidentally, school lunches are ON TOPIC insofar as a 9-year-old girl has gotten more attention, more hits, public support and funding for her cause in 4 days of on-line presence than cold fusion researchers have attracted in 23 years. That tells we are not doing a good job promoting cold fusion on the Internet. Shame on us. The Vortex-BL list is for controversial stuff, not off-topic stuff. It is difficult to define what is off-topic in cold fusion, or how far off it has to be before it should be marked. It is even more difficult to define what is "inappropriate." Frankly, I do not see any point to trying to define that. Who cares? Let's keep Vortex-l on topic - that is, discussion of Crackpot Theories, Cold Fusion, Free Energy and Taboo Physics. Vortex-L has always had a broader range of topic than this. If you want a more restricted forum, join the CMNS group. I have heard it is pretty good these days. (I am not a member.) You could join both. I don't understand why extra verbiage bothers you. It isn't as if we are running out of room on the Internet. Maybe you need better e-mail filtering. Gmail is pretty good. You can set a filter to auto-delete messages based on the sender (a kill-file), or the content, or you can shuffle messages off into a separate folder, such as "Vortex OFF TOPIC." - Jed
