Tanstaafl wrote:
> If this garbage OT crap ('sad but true Linux sucks', and 'Hey Humans
> I'm a machine') is typical of this list,
It varies from season to season. Although often it feels like the
September That Never Ended. There are more than 2,000 plus
subscribers to debian-user. Imagine if it were a physical town hall
style meeting with that many people in one location. How many of
those meetings in real life remain on topic and with a high signal to
noise ratio? Very few of the ones I have actually attended. Everyone
wants to talk about the issues that are important to them and everyone
has a different set of issues.
Imagine again if every one of those people could speak without any
limitation. Or rather the only limitation is each person's own
discipline. That is basically what we have here. A small number of
participants without discipline. In many ways it is a problem due to
its own success that it is so popular and there are so many
participants. That we only have a few problems is actually pretty
good given the large number of subscribers.
> is there a debian related list that doesn't allow such crap to go on
> and on and on and on and on and on ad nauseum?
No. The only way to do this would be to set up a moderated mailing
list. And then with the volume of mail it would be overwhelming to
most moderators. It would definitely require a team. And to set this
up would require a large change in culture. From a completley free
spirited one to one that required proctoring. Cultural changes come
hard.
Personally I find it interesting that one of the biggest off-topic
posters often complains that another mailing list for another distro
became moderated. But given the actions I think many of us would vote
for that moderation here to control the off-topic postings.
> If it is typical, and there is no other option for list based debian
> support, I guess its time to start building another kill file.
You won't be the first nor the last to hack up a killfile. But
execution of a killfile is complicated and difficult. You really want
to kill an entire thread. Because when the trolling is particularly
successful many people post into these long running threads. Even I
am not without fault. It really should be integrated into the mail
reader so that you could kill by a combination of posters and subjects
and that would be persistent across days as new messages arrive.
My personal technique is to keep all of the messages specifically so
that I can recognize one of those threads and then quickly mark the
entire thread including subject changes as read (C-r in mutt) and move
on. If I deleted messages it would break the threads and I would have
to wade through all of the broken off sub-threads individually.
In the most recent long running off topic thread there were 87
messages posted by 29 different addresses. Trying to killfile to
reduce the noise there would require a large number of addresses some
of which usually post reasonable stuff most of the time.
Really this needs better mailer support. Something like a scoring
system where one could score good quality posters higher and reduce
the noise from low quality posters. (Of course gnus comes to mind
since it has scoring. I am not currently using it but perhaps I
should try it again.)
I will mention the wiki page of mailing list posting rules. Maybe a
few will read it.
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMailingLists#Posting_Rules.2C_Guidelines.2C_and_Tips
Good luck! If you come up with a magic recipe please share it with
the rest of us.
Bob
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