Austin Hair wrote:
In Buenos Aires I had multiple people ask (even practically beg) me to do something about foundation-l. One person said "fucking moderate foundation-l, already!"—to which I explained why I didn't think that moderating individuals was a solution, but had to admit that I didn't really have a better one.
Maybe I'm unusual in treating large mailing lists as if they were FidoNet or Usenet discussion forums, but the idea of people being bothered by long threads they don't care about, individuals whose posts they don't like, etc., is strange to me. Isn't that easily handled on the client side? Killfile individual posters, delete/filter entire threads, etc. Do most people use clients where that's unreasonably difficult?
It does require *some* community standards to enable it. For example, it really helps the client-side filtering if people choose meaningful subject lines, and change subject lines when threads have drifted to new topics. But it's a fairly minimal set of things that have to be centrally enforced. It certainly seems easier than trying to come up with a centrally enforced set of standards that will simultaneously make everyone happy!
-Mark