Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] List Guidelines reminder

[Rick Brown]

I totally see your point.  We walk a fine line with the AHECTA listserv as well.  So my compromise would be that it would be okay for a vendor to solicit opinion but that all replies to the vendor should be off list.  The problem with that however is even in this day and age of technology, people still don't read and pay attention, and will automatically reply without paying attention to who it's going to.  Of course, if they are a member of an association they have access to the member list and contact info and should be able to send targeted email to those members outside of the listserv.  If the listserv is not maintained by an association then I don't know if the vendors have access to the listserv members.   They can obviously mine addresses from the list over time. I think the case here is that Devin saw the honest dialog about Meraki, and wanted to know what those that have seen or used his products thought about them. Rick Philippe Hanset wrote: Rick, Where does this stop? If one vendor solicits a honest opinion on the list, all vendors could. A slippery slope that could potentially destroy the original intent of the list (not mentioning the undesirable SPAM).  The original purpose of the list is to share knowledge between educational institutions about WLANs. Educause accepts commercial lurkers and neutral technology contributions from vendors.  So far it has served both communities fairly well. A lot of subscribers to this list do not even want commercial entities lurking. We have been able to maintain a decent equilibrium for almost 10 years: Nov 13, 2000 is when the list was moved from University of Tennessee to Educause http://listserv.educause.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A1=ind0011&L=WIRELESS-LAN Regards, Philippe Hanset -- ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.