209.68.1.140 (209.68.1.0 /24) blocked by bellsouth.net for SMTP

Mon Sep 26 06:50:23 UTC 2005

On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 09:03:55PM -0700, jc dill wrote:
> 
> p.s.  Speaking of "unreasonable requests" - I feel it is unreasonable 
> for a member of the moderating committee to whine that he can't filter 
> out "undesired" posts due to using a lame email client, and to then 
> coerce a poster into "tagging" these posts.  I laud the poster for being 
> willing to tag anyway, but think it's a very bad precedent that "tag 
> because I'm using a lame email client and I'm on the moderating 
> committee so you need to cater to my whims" is allowed to prevail.  I 
> thought this was supposed to be a group of highly technical people who 
> are expected to do whatever filtering is necessary on their own end...

I'm aware of quite a few people who have encouraged said poster to tag his 
off-topic posts for easy filtering, myself included. Ideally this material 
belongs in a blog with a comments section, or in a seperate mailing list. 
Failing that, it needs to be tagged for easy filtering by those who aren't 
interested.

Given the number of times this has come up for discussion, and the number 
of people who have expressed dissatisfaction with these posts (without 
even making any guesses as to which are in the majority and which are in 
the minority), I don't think asking for them to be well-tagged is an 
unreasonable request, no matter how possible it may be to match them via 
another header if you ran a different mail client. Adding a subject tag 
also allows readers to match on the off-topic chatter spawned by these 
posts, not just the original post.

So far all we've accomplished with this debate is proving that there are 
interested parties on both sides. I really don't think anyone has been 
directly "against" the content in question, we just don't want this 
operational and technical mailing list for network operations being taken 
over by news and general technology chatter. My stance is that everything 
has its place, and this material should be given its own. While I agree 
that yes it is technically possible for every person who isn't interested 
in this material to configure and maintain their own filters (and hit 
delete a lot), it seems like just having those who ARE interested 
subscribe to a new list or RSS feed to get it is easier.

Please, can't we just solve this with a little sanity, and stop these back 
and forth pissing match threads and off-topic posts?

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)