On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 10:27 PM, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote: Dudes. This thread. Case in point. (As I suppose it was fated to be, sigh). Yes, I am reading it, because I care about this issue. I posted a few months ago when it came up, I edited the meta page on the subject, and I posted (I admit, with some frustration), in response to Birgitte's initial post in this thread. In the three days since then, there's been 33 messages; 16 of them are from Thomas Dalton and Will Johnson. Many of these emails have a bit of a hostile tone (my original post included, mea culpa), and include sentences like "Anyone that says otherwise is wrong", "That statement is false" and "Get over it." Despite the fact that such language is upsetting -- each time I read such a message I get a little defensive, and feel a little hostile myself, and then a little upset at having such a reaction -- I have read (or at least skimmed past) all these messages, because I care about this thread, and this issue, and I can't easily ignore individual emails with Gmail's threading feature. And I'm quite happy that people are participating in discussion on a topic I care about; that's great. But I have to wonder -- what point did you have to make about the future of the mailing list that needed eight emails to make instead of, say, one or two? As far as I can tell everyone still has the same opinion they came to the discussion with, which is the same opinion that everyone who participated had a few weeks ago, and so this back and forth isn't really getting us anywhere. Which means that some of you posting out there must enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing. So I think the main issue here is that some people enjoy back and forth chatter more than others; some participants find it perfectly tolerable and others find it migraine-inducing. So maybe we need one foundation list with posting limits and another for free-form discussion? The former could be like the announcements list previously suggested but with a bit more (but not much more) leeway for discussion. Or perhaps as has been suggested in the past (because this issue has been coming up at least since 2004, according to the archives) a Wikimedia-social list that could absorb people's desire for conversation and argument? And yes, in the meantime, I will keep reading -- even though at least one of you is no doubt poised and ready to tell me to grow a thicker skin, or to shut up myself, or how it's your given right to respond as much as you want to every one-line half-hearted argument that gets made on Foundation-l and I must hate personal freedom to even think about any alternative mode of dialog, or to give me advice on how to read email (I've been using it for 15 years), or to tell me to set up email filters already (I don't, because of LSS) -- despite this, I will keep reading, because as I said originally this is the main place to discuss the Foundation and the projects, and that's something I care about. regards, -- phoebe