[clug] An alternate place for longer, meandering threads?

[Conrad Canterford]

On Sun, 2009-09-13 at 13:14 +1000, Daniel Pittman wrote:
> steve jenkin <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au> writes:
> > We may have lost Ben, James and Conrad from the list...  But their departure
> > raises an issue.
> *nod*  ...and their loss is disappointing.

Let me start by apologising for my outburst. You haven't quite lost me
(yet).
I'm still musing whether I still see the value of remaining on the CLUG
list. Please note that this is not just because of the recent female
numeric inequality threads. Those threads just brought it home to me
that I actually read extremely little of the traffic on this list. I've
stayed subscribed for over 10 years now because there are occasionally
interesting (to me) threads that I would not otherwise have been aware
of. However, when the list suddenly grows to being nearly 50% of my
daily viewable email traffic (spam filters are a wonderful thing),
almost entirely in one thread which very quickly broke down into two
camps and just went in circles, I have to wonder if I wouldn't get
better value from unsubscribing, safe in the knowledge that google will
bring to my attention any thread that is relevant to a future need.

No, I'm not after sympathy, pleas for me to stay or arguments why I
should or should not be subscribed. I'll sort that out for myself, but I
thought I did owe people some explanation for my outburst.

> > [Why would you do that publicly?  Sorry, I don't understand that.]

Because sometimes frustration gets the better of us? We had one thread
with maybe a dozen people participating, that appeared to be arguing in
circles without actually resolving anything, and which (unlike most
threads on this list) was actually bordering on personal insults (at
least in a few cases - and due credit that the people involved didn't
escalate into a full-on flame war).

> However, the split of "core" and "off-topic" list works well for the Victorian
> LUG, which has quite a lot of, well, technical flame-wars, basically.  The
> same sort of heat, probably less light, but helped by having the outlet.

I've seen this work well in other instances. I've also seen it be a
dismal failure. I think the CLUG list would likely fall into the later
category, due to the very rare instances of such threads, but if other
people think it might work, give it a go. I agree with Daniel that the
"social moderated" approach is preferable to the (possibly arbitrary)
enforced moderation if this approach is taken.

Conrad.