[plug] Re: PLUG listing to port?

[Leon Brooks]

On Monday, 1 April 2002 18:37, Trent Lloyd wrote:
> In the conference there are about 8 or 9 people (or so).. organasing
> it and many more people helping out in some way,

Sometimes I'm tempted to be like the social security case in Baby Geniuses 
and use a different pseudonym every week. Or just post as Anonymous Coward. 
Then maybe people will look at the actual message content instead of playing 
appendage-size games with names, pseudonyms, and different ways of confusing 
root accounts with impolite ways of saying boinked, borked, porked, bonked, 
diddled, rogered, run through with a pork sword, or... well, I'm sure you get 
the idea.

This list is as unmoderated as possible, most of us seem to like it that way, 
and if that doesn't warm your cup of tea, then fork off

a new list with you as moderator and have the time of your life.

One of the facts of life is that in everything there is a balance between 
freedom and control. At heart, we all want to control what goes on around us, 
including what is said on this list - and we all want complete freedom as 
well. Now have a little think about this:

If we each went defacto moderator and shot down just 2% of the messages on 
this list (too short, too long, off topic, offends my dictionary, old thread, 
pseudonym, uses Windows charset, meta, whatever) - that's only one message in 
50 each - the odds of a message surviving moderation are 0.98^Nmembers. 
Picking 100 as a nice round number of members, about one message in 7 would 
get through. Recently, that may seem like a good idea: but more than 6 out of 
the 7 messages would be canned, and odds are you would have been interested 
in at least some of those.

The bottom line is that it's not practical to try to legislate common sense. 
In most cases, it's a far better idea to blip painlessly over anything that 
offends or bores you, including other people complaining about stuff on the 
list. Good plan. In reality, some of the people reading will be tired and 
cranky, and that blipping will become correspondingly difficult.

Dear old fight-o-net had an interesting solution to that one. They would 
sometimes boot off both the original offender, and the original offendee as 
well (on a charge of too-easily-annoyed, which is exactly what they call it, 
no kidding).

It's been about 3 months since we had our last meta-discussion about this 
kind of thing. How about another one, hackles down, now?

Should we moderate, or not?

Should we tolerate excessive complaint, or not?

What does `not' involve? A week's silence?

Who arbitrates? Do we vote?

Can it happen semi-automatically?

Would bullying result?

How say you?

Cheers; Leon