On Fri, Aug 09, 2002 at 01:49:42PM -0000, awyatt@fewt.com wrote:
>
> Did we ever convince the powers that be to create a slugbay list?
>
> -Andrew
Lists for SLUG musicians, SLUG jobs, and now SLUG buy-and-sell have all
been suggested in the past. I don't particularly want to rain on
anyone's parade, but I'm really not in favor of more lists.
For those of you who've been around for a long time, the charter for the
original SLUG list years ago was very strict. No advocacy, no news
items, just tech talk. I had nothing to do with setting those rules. The
original president (Henry White) used to regularly post news items in
violation of the charter, which I thought was pretty funny. I always
fancied that he was thumbing his nose at the rules.
When we moved to a different list host, I purposely created a flexible
charter. My idea was this: if you're going to have rules, you're
obligated to enforce them. If you make them strict, then you're going to
aggravate a lot of people. I knew that in the normal course of list
traffic, people _would_ post news items, advocacy, humor, etc., no
matter what the rules were. You could either let them, or you could
squash them every time it happened. I didn't see any need to be that
mean-spirited over a simple email list. So I made the choice to allow
that kind of traffic, while emphasizing in the charter that this was
primarily a list for technical questions.
One of the things I noticed about meetings for the first couple of years
of this group was that they didn't really create much of a sense of
community. I didn't like that. I felt that, as the underdog, we really
should have some sense of community. That meant catering to newbies,
being "inclusive" (I really hate that word), and fostering social
interaction. Not some snob club of people who know more than anyone else
about computers. I figured the lists should also foster that social
interaction.
There are folks who think that lists like this ought to be completely
technical, nothing else. They're welcome to their opinion. I don't
happen to agree. And if it's simply unbearable for them, there are many
other lists out there. No one forces them to be on the SLUG list.
Moreover, to keep things from really getting out of hand (racial
bashing, religious tirades, massive profanity), we created the SLUG
Politics list. That way, if I say, "You can't say that here", I'm not
saying that you can't say it at all. You're more than welcome to take it
to SLUG Politics, where there are no rules.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I don't really have a problem
with the "I've got an X I'd like to get rid of", or "I need Y; anybody
got one?" traffic. (If the officers disagree with me, we can have a
back-channel discussion on the admin list.)
You also may not realize that there are actually six SLUG lists, all of
which have to be administered. You normally don't see all these lists,
but the list admins do. Adding more just adds to the workload. Moreover,
on top of the almost 500 emails I get every day, I have to read every
email that comes across all the SLUG lists, to ensure things don't get
out of hand (which they sometimes do very quickly).
Of course, I'm open to contrary arguments. All I'm saying is that in my
opinion, new lists aren't really needed. I think the charter on the
current SLUG list is flexible enough to allow this kind of traffic. And
hopefully subscribers are tolerant enough to simply delete what they
don't want to read, rather than screaming about it. But then, I've been
wrong before. ;-}
Paul
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