Jimmy Wales wrote:
It might be better to have the limit be on a per-day basis?
I don't think so. Sometimes when you have been away for a week and need to catch up, you can post useful comments on four or five messages, and it would be harmful to block that. But someone posting one or two messages every day at an even pace becomes a burden for all of the list. So a quota should span a week or longer. The mailing list archive is organized by month, so that seems to be a natural and reasonable unit.
My guess is that Thomas's contributions were not 3 per day evenly spaced, but zero for a significant part of the time and then massive participation in one or two threads that got overwhelming.
Posts 3 Date: Fri, 2 Nov 17 Date: Sat, 3 Nov 3 Date: Sun, 4 Nov 3 Date: Mon, 5 Nov 1 Date: Tue, 6 Nov 1 Date: Thu, 8 Nov 1 Date: Fri, 9 Nov 1 Date: Sat, 10 Nov 1 Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2 Date: Fri, 16 Nov 7 Date: Sat, 17 Nov 8 Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2 Date: Mon, 19 Nov 10 Date: Wed, 21 Nov 14 Date: Thu, 22 Nov 10 Date: Fri, 23 Nov 5 Date: Sun, 25 Nov 4 Date: Mon, 26 Nov 4 Date: Wed, 28 Nov
Maybe he has this free time on his hands, maybe he writes fast. But the list deteriorates. It becomes boring for the good people and newcomers are scared away. It's just like Loud Howard in a Dilbert strip. Or like a broken window neighborhood.
(I am not picking on Thomas here, other than that he was at the top of the list, volume-wise.)
But I can afford to play bad cop here.