Re: OT: OT

["Gary S. Callison" <huey -at- interaccess -dot- com>]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, mstockman -at- mac -dot- com (Mike Stockman) wrote:
> Not to pretend I'm the list police or anything, but one rule I've always 
> followed (well, until today) is that if I think I should put "OT:" before 
> my subject line, that's a good indication that I shouldn't send it at all.
> Given that Eric just posted this morning that we should all get back on 
> topic, and given that I'm tired of deleting twenty messages at a time 
> that are all prefixed with "OT:" (gotta set up a rule to automate that, 
> the way I have for "ADV"), does anyone else think we can agree that OT 
> means "don't post"?

I think Eric's FAQ is one of the better ones I've seen for a listserv, but
the number of successful loosely-moderated online communities that don't
tend to the extremes - either dying from lack of any participation, or
drowning in useless off-topic drivel - can probably be counted on a small
number of hands. The 'cute story about my cat' phenomenon is impossible to
avoid without strict moderation. People will not read the FAQ, they will
not Google before they post to see if the same question didn't get asked
last week, and fifty years from now people will argue Word2049 vs. Frame27
and whether or not tech writers need to be experts on whatever they're
documenting. The 'Monty Hall problem' has been discussed to death over the
course of the last ten years, just like 'glass flows'. 

But, on this listserv anyways, there is a solution. Set your listserv
subscription to NOMAIL (the instructions you got when you signed up, the
FAQ, the webpage - SOMEWHERE it explains how to do this) and read the
postings to this list in the usenet mirror bit.listserv.techwr-l. 

This enables you to do a couple different things that may make life
easier. First, you can killfile anything with 'OT' in the subject. Second,
if there are individuals posting to this list whose posts add no joy
whatsoever to your life, you can killfile them and be spared reading 
any more of those. Given a powerful newsreader, like slrn, you can even
set up complicated scoring systems so threads will be presented to you in
the order of their relevance to you. Suppose you really like posts by
John Posada- it can move all of the threads that John posts to up to the
top of the stack. Or automatically move down any post that contains the
words 'font-fondling'. It's a much more flexible interface than just
having an extra 20-50 listserv posts a day dumped into your
already-overflowing email stream. 

-- 
Huey



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