[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: rampant offtopic and offensive posts to debian-user

On 05/19/2007 01:19 PM, Greg Folkert wrote:

On Sat, 2007-05-19 at 09:17 -0700, Mike Bird wrote:

On Saturday 19 May 2007 08:02, M. Fioretti wrote:

Offensive or not, it doesn't even matter with you, will you please
realize it? You are simply making a lot of USELESS noise.


I just move on and forget it.  More people should try that.

and this is, once more, the same pathetic excuse for your behavior
that I already commented here (#3):

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2007/05/msg02934.html

so you should really stop using it and grow up, thanks. Just the
answers already received on list to Joey's post should be more than
enough to prove to you, once and for all, that it doesn't matter how
easy it is to use email equivalents of ear plugs: you and the others I
already mentioned still aren't authorized to yell all the time about
everything you please in a public forum which has another purpose.

This is why I'm posting also this reply to the moderators. I really
hope they put a stop to this, this time.

Excellent reasoning and presentation Marco.  I hope the listmasters
will finally fix this serious problem.


But just HOW do you fix this kind of problem on an *OPEN* list,
especially for a Debian Developer, that does the "sword" packages and
the cyrus-sasl2 package? (and others packages)

Come, lets here a solution, I've discussed some solutions, how about
you?
I think you suggested making debian-user a closed list. I doubt that that would work because my guts (no statistics--sorry) tell me that the majority of OT posts come from list regulars who are subscribed. 

Making the list closed would only harm people wanting quick support.
I think that it's best to state a policy against off-topic posts, but any enforcement is not a good idea. Most likely, any enforcement would amount to blocking certain e-mail address or IP addresses, or making the list moderated. New e-mail addresses are cheap and easy to create, and blocking by IP address would possibly harm dial-up users; any moderator for debian-user would have to deal with 100+ messages per day--it would be a full-time job.
The best way to deal with the OT posts is for someone to, from time to time, remind people in an OT thread what the list policy is.
Also, I believe that the convention of putting [OT] in the subject line has tremendous value, and the policy might make mention of that convention. Because many of the posters are nice enough to put [OT] in the subject lines when they take a thread off-topic, I wasn't really aware of how "bad" the problem had gotten until Joey Hess' post. 

My filters had placed the messages into my trash folder.
Reply to: