Re: rampant offtopic and offensive posts to debian-user
On Sunday 20 May 2007, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 11:51:08AM -0700, Mike Bird wrote:
> > This particular problem is solved for the most part by a policy
> > change that says non-Debian topics are inappropriate. This opens
> > the door to various actions starting with "this is not appropriate,
> > please stop" in the event that fox news junkies again start braying
> > their ignorance here. This simple and often effective remedy is
> > currently denied us because there is as yet no such policy.
>
> What if we, the list users, could agree on a policy change that then
> the list maintainers could take under advisement. There is already a
> bit of a policy in the code of conduct at:
> http://www.debian.org/MailingLists
>
> It would be helpful if that code of conduct had its own page and be
> enumerated so that it could be referred to directly when we try to
> self-regulate. Eg: "Yoh WhatsYourName, this topic, while interesting
> in a general sense, is rather OT. Please take it off list, per the
> list code of conduct item 13 at
> http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/CodeOfConduct#13.";
This is different and it's close to what I mentioned earlier and I think
may have been mentioned before. It combines several possibilities, but
it, unfortunately, puts some more work on the list moderators.
Before I say this, the only time I've ever seen moderator action (and
remember, I don't watch ever thread on here) was within the past year
when a topic included criticizing the monitors. Instead of completely
censoring the posts, they delayed any on that thread for 24 hours. I
think it stopped rather quickly under the charge of censorship and
other issues. Still, that does point out a possible option.
If there were a Debian-OT list, then when things start to stray too far,
there would be a couple options to moderators. When a thread, or a
branch of a thread, starts to go too far off topic, the moderator could
make 1 of two choices: 1) Delay the posts for 24 hours to slow it down,
or 2) automatically shunt the posts to the OT group. Of course, both
would be after a warning. When a discussion starts veering into, say,
politics, then the moderator could warn and say, "This is going too far
OT for too long. Please either take it to the OT list or to a private
discussion before action is needed." If that doesn't work, then all
future posts by that poster or on that thread or whichever is the worst
issue, would be redirected to the OT list.
I think this would take a significant amount of work over the next 6
weeks, but once people got used to it, I think it would be smoother.
If people wanted to discuss other topics, they could just redirect
their responses to OT. There would be no censorship, those who want to
participate can do so, and those that don't won't have to. Since peer
pressure has been shown to be ineffective in some cases and some people
don't self-police, then this seems to be the solution with the least
interference to effect a change, or, as Asimov said, the smallest
change to produce the greatest effect.
Hal
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