On Tue, 13 Aug 1996, Stephan Bennett wrote:

Frankly, I don't see why you have taken such large offence.  There are things called 
filters, and there's a button with the word "delete" upon it.  Use these options if, in 
the future, a thread annoys you.

True.  I often do.  But it's annoying when out of, say, two hundred
messages in my in box, one hundred twenty of them are ones that I'd want
to delete after a cursory scanning at best.  And it does take time,
especially if there's two separate branches to a thread, one of which is
comments and criticism and the other of which is noise.

Spam is on this list.  Irrelevant topics, joking posts.  Light hearted humor at best.  
Annoyances that you can skip over when not interested at worst.  If you can't accept 
this, then perhapse RAAC is the place for you.  I've been there.  It's not bad.  More 
sterile, I suppose.

Or more relevant, on-topic, and efficient, from another point of view.
The thing is, though, there seem to be two basic views of this list
around.  One is that it should be a list for fanfiction and criticism,
with a certain amount of digression from the topics stemming naturally
from discussion, but kept to a sane and moderate level.  The other seems
to be that this should be a  Shampoo-must-die-and-Hibiki-family-genetics-
and-weather-reports-and-in-jokes-and-welcoming-old-list-members-back-and-
various-huge-amounts-of-directionless-discussion-and-joking-around list
with the occasional bit of fanfic and C&C on it to serve as seeds for the
social stuff.  As I've said before, some of us are on this list not
because we like the 'SPAM', but because we want to read interesting fan
fiction and try to help improve it.  And I've noticed that now that RAAC
is back up, people *are* leaving the list due to the volume level and low
signal-to-noise ratio.  I'm still hanging in there for one reason or
another, but I realize that it would make my life a bit easier to deal
with if I didn't have to spend so much time going through email each
day...  Really, for me at least, and for a fair number of others, the only
viable options are eventually going to be to either convince this list to
rein itself in a bit (seemingly an utterly futile task) or leave for
someplace that better suits our needs - RAAC, for instance, or a fanfic
list someone will create that enforces on-topic discussion.  (That's not
such a far-out idea, you know - I could easily see a fanfic list that
doesn't let itself descend so far into irrelevance, and there's doubtless
people out there who might like to create one...)

In truth tho, I see not your problem

That, I think, *is* the main problem - that so many of the loudest people
on this list don't realize why others would be disenchanted with it.  If
everyone understood that there are people out there who don't appreciate
chatty in-jokes between a small proportion of the list (I think White Wolf
has said there are about 200 subscribers to this list.  Now, just judging
by how many different people actually post, how many would you *think*
there are?  Twenty, maybe?  Perhaps even thirty?  Perhaps not even that?)
or people writing two-page messages just to *bap* each other, or pun wars
or things like that.  If they *did* realize that, then maybe we could work
out a mutually agreeable solution - but as things are going, it seems more
and more likely that the social participants are going to drive the
pure-on-topic participants away.  Disappointing, to me, but hey, at least
the list won't have quite as many fanfics to get in the way of your
weather reports.

--
Scott Johnson |
zagyg@io.com  |            This space intentionally left blank.