John Underhill wrote: [snip]
There is the issue of sustaining readership. If window of acceptable subject matter is too narrow, appeal will decline, and with it some of the readership that we need to remain active will leave the list, hence we need some [reasonable] measure of flexibility allowed for in guidelines, [think: discretion]. [snip] John
I would like to interject my two bits as well, if permissible. As a student of the Network Administration, I joined this list to get a better understanding of the trade as a whole, and I can say that without reservation I have learned an enormous amount. That said, if the list became subject to a strict set of posting rules, the value that I derive from lurking here diminishes greatly, as I will no longer be seeing Network Operations as a whole, but some subset thereof that has been artificially imposed. I think that the best way for the list to remain at least somewhat focused is very simple: ignore it. If you think that a post is offtopic, don't respond at all. If an argument gets out of hand, ignore it. Don't post saying "Don't feed the troll," don't say "How is this related to Network Operations?" If you and everyone else feels that it is offtopic, and ignore it, that one message will remain one message, rather than becoming several hundred, and eventually the trolls and OT posters will leave, because they are no longer generating the response that they had hoped. If the behavior becomes bad enough, I believe that there is an oversight committee who is quite capable of running a couple of 'unsubscribes' through the system to maintain some semblance of order. Again, just my 2 (student) bits. -- Josh Cheney jcheney@mfx.net http://www.joshcheney.com