List Rules

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2005-02-26 at 12:31 -0700, James McKenzie wrote:

> > The second is that ad hominem attacks probably won't result in positive 
> > action. In fact, in the old days, a million years ago in Internet time, we 
> > called those sorts of posts "Trolls".
> This is the number one reason that we need 'guidelines' on acceptable 
> conduct.  One of those guidelines is to leave moderation of the list to 
> the moderators.  I've seen many messages about 'rule' infractions, but 
> no published rules to back them up.
----
I don't quarrel with your motivations but I do quarrel with your
expectations.

1 - This is Red Hat server and they make the rules. They have
deliberately chosen to keep the rules to a minimum. They are going to
let pretty much everything slide that isn't entirely disrupted to the
commerce of the list.

2 - You are confusing convention with etiquette and then rfc standards -
they are clearly not the same thing at all.

Convention would have a large amount of email programs putting in a "> "
at the beginning of each line copied from the original into a reply.
This is almost always configurable on the mail client (I don't know of
one that doesn't offer configuration options). Some clients (mutt comes
to mind) will use "\_ " for this purpose by default - who cares? This
isn't rfc (there's no standard to point to). In essence, you are
converting this convention into an etiquette because it suits you.

3 - There is always an outcry when someone tries to be 'list mom' and
point out transgressions - not that I care but it tends to drag the list
into an argument about the suitability. Thus the intent of having some
set of rules to minimize useless traffic becomes the cause for more
useless traffic. My personal belief is that I can filter out most of the
stuff either by sending specific user to /dev/null or by deleting
threads but people 'spamming' list with commercial inducements - whether
direct or by indirect viral marketing tend to rankle me.

If you go back to the routing weekly posting that 'Melgil' used to post
about FC-2 stuff last Sept/Oct/Nov, that seemed to be the type of thing
that has value - most of what you are discussing, despite all good
intentions, strikes me as fairly useless. 

Generally, when someone isn't getting it, I tend to point them to:
<http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>

Craig