Re: rampant offtopic and offensive posts to debian-user
On Sat, 2007-05-19 at 08:43 +0200, M. Fioretti wrote:
> On Fri, May 18, 2007 16:41:49 PM -0400, Joey Hess (joeyh@debian.org) 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.
>
> Thanks Joey for publicly addressing this issue! I had decided to write
> an almost identical complain, so you saved me some time.
>
> I joined this list around Christmas and, since then, I have found it a
> real pain in the neck for the very reason you have just signalled to
> the listmasters. Ron, Celejar, Judd, Roberto, Michael, Michelle and
> surely a few others I have forgotten (yes, it's necessary to make
> names at this point) have flooded this list with *hundreds* of totally
> unnecessary messages, regardless of what I think of their contents.
Excuse me. This month I have made 8 posts, this being the 9th. Of
those, four were off-topic and marked as such. One was marked
off-topic, but wasn't actually off-topic (it concerned a package found
in Debian, clive). Last month I made all of 14 posts, one of which was
off-topic and was marked as such, and it was just a joke. In March I
made a whopping (for me) 29 posts, 3 of which were off-topic (in the
"dumb query" and "A Republican!!!" threads).
I'm not sure I've broken 100 posts in total this year, let alone 100
off-topic posts, and certainly not "hundreds."
Which brings me to the only point I wanted to make, because frankly I
could care less what you think. Some people's (present company
included) hysteria over the supposed off-topic abusers is, IMO,
astonishingly overheated. I find it hard to believe that the majority
of people technically proficient enough to install Debian in a Windows
world are utterly helpless to filter out unwanted mailing list email.
I'm much more inclined to believe that those who complain are probably
control freaks, which seems more in keeping with the tone and tenor of
even the on-topic discussions I've followed among Debian developers and
other Linux developers and advocates -- discussions Joey Hess has
certainly participated in.
Compared to what I've seen following similar lists and discussions in
the *BSD world, I'm beginning to realize the farther away one gets from
the DFSG and the GPL, the more relaxed and easygoing people are more
likely to be (Theo de Raadt notwithstanding).
--
Michael M. ++ Portland, OR ++ USA
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to
dream." --S. Jackson
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