Re: Moderation of GZG-L (was Re: Back from SALUTE and bye bye)

On Mon, Apr 29, 2002 at 02:16:00PM -0400, Jerry Han wrote:
>Matt, if you're out there, I'd like your opinion on this -- you 
>administer a whole whackload of email lists.

So do I. :-)

I don't think the list is broken. There is a fundamental problem with
staying on-topic: there haven't been any new GZG rules for a while.
Discussing figures is all very well, but I suspect there's a limit to
how much one can talk about them. This means that the bounds of
topicality will intrinsically get loosened to "anything related to the
games"; and this is not necessarily a bad thing. I run the Millennium's
End list, which is nominally for discussion of that role-playing game;
but since the company folded a couple of years ago it's devolved in the
same way. As the list-admin, I'll ask people to stop threads that are
getting purely argumentative; so far, nobody has refused to do so.

I don't know who our list-admin here actually is. But I don't regard the
occasional small flame-war - and this current one is nothing compared
with some we've seen - as a sign that the list needs to be administered
in a different way. Yeah, so it's almost always the same people
involved: does this really matter? It's a shame when people unsubscribe,
but I don't think it's possible proactively to prevent them from doing
so.

To be honest, I get more annoyed by Dawgie's postings when he forgets to
switch to lower-case than by the flamage. (Mostly because Dawgie has
interesting things to say, and I find upper-case REALLY HARD TO READ.)

I'm not in favour of moderation. I can always killfile someone; and if
they do say something of interest, chances are someone will respond to
it. This list doesn't have the problem that _really_ drives people away,
of a small group of people who take it upon themselves to be snide to
everyone they don't like.

Trying to persuade people to change subject lines to match what they're
discussing never works. What can be worth doing is splitting the list,
as to some extent has happened with gzg-comp and the gzg-aliens lists -
perhaps gzg-politics? gzg-miniatures? You'd get people like me who'd
subscribe to everything, and other people would go for just the ones
that interested them. However, remember the rule of on-line communities:
the value of the community roughly equals the square of the number of
participants. More mailing lists die from non-use because there are too
few people on them than die from over-use. Personally, I don't want to
see GZG-L split, for that reason. (Also, I have a good email client
which can quickly mark-read messages in a thread I don't care about.)

If people want a different list for FT, they can always try the
FullThrust@yahoogroups one. There's some overlap of people - Dean
Gundberg, Glenn Wilson, Oerjan, me, and probably others - but it's much
lower-volume (only 65 messages since I joined on March 12).