On 05/18/2007 05:08 PM, Kamaraju S Kusumanchi wrote:
Joey Hess wrote:Frans, Cord, Martin, Pascal, I'm writing the listmasters because reading debian-user has become nearly unbearable for me (one of the sadly few DDs who bothers to read our user lists) due to volume and offensiveness/repetativeness of offtopic posts there.I would like to help in whatever way I can to stop these OT posts. I have previously complained about it. But the OT posters never seem to listen. There were only a bunch in the beginning, of late the number of OT posters is also increasing. Now that the complaint is coming from a DD, I hope that some action/policy will be laid out...
The problem of OT posts is not really all that bad so long as people follow the convention of putting the [OT] tag in the subject line.
OT posts are only annoying if you see them.
Greg Folkert (http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2007/05/msg01282.html) even made a mockery of people complaining about OT posts. That is just sad. What makes this whole issue difficult is that these people hijack threadsand make them OT.
Again, the "hijacking" doesn't affect the thread for the people who both use [OT] filters and continue the technical discussions--assuming that the "hijackers" follow the [OT] convention.
While I may be interested in the original thread, it becomes unreadable in the due course. Moreover, the OT posters are pretty knowledgeable about Debian (atleast they know a lot more than myself). So I cannot even killfile them since then I would not benefit from their non-OT posts.I've in the past threatened to leave -user entirely, and I have in fact moved a lot of my attention to providingsupport on forums.debian.net[4], but I would prefer that Debian articulate a policy of not tolerating this kind of behavior.It's so sad that these OT posters are driving away people like you. I have always enjoyed (learned a lot from) your posts on this mailing list. thanks raju
I also want to thank you Joey Hess for helping out on this list. I hope that the OT threads don't push you away.
I'm just a mere user, but the idea of enforcing the topic concerns me. If the list maintainer is to become a list moderator, he is going to have a lot of work to do since debian-user gets an average of 100 messages per day.
Blocking people who often make off-topic posts is also not problem-free because such blocking would probably be done by e-mail address, and e-mail addresses are easy to create and cheap.
If the blocking is done by IP address, it'll probably affect people who use dialup-connections like me.
However, I do think it would be good to add language to the description of the mailing list that suggests that people take off-topic conversations elsewhere.