From: Daniel Golding <dgolding@burtongroup.com> ... Its entirely possible for nanog-l to be self policing, or, failing that, for users to simply use procmail on those who wander off-topic (for some definition of off-topic). Putting an [OT] subject banner on such posts is also nice.

i don't want widescale procmail to be the only way nanog@ is readable by a big subset of the netops community, simply because i know a lot of the folks here (lazy overworked disorganized bums, mostly) and if it takes way more effort to be subscribed than not, many will just unsubscribe.

There's such a thing as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When highly clued, genuinely contributing folks are treated poorly for the occasional in-joke or comment, the S:N ratio will suffer in the longer term.

nope nope nope no-no-nope. that's a subjective standard. there's no way to moderate based on "does more good than harm" without strong and formal and objective definitions of what "good" is and what "harm" is, plus an appeals process. trust me: we don't want "strong" "formal" "process". (my own system, which has produced only two warnings in about 10 years, is to make the good:harm ratio high enough in any given message that the "in" jokes are merely a tolerable percentage of the mass of THAT message; what i see some other bums doing, though, is pure-"in"-joke messages.)

I'm certainly hoping that the network operations community will feel no need to "talk with their feet" after we all sit down with the Merit staff and let our feelings be known, but that is certainly a possibility.

like the libertarians say, "use your dollar votes!" i'm comfortable with a system whereby susan occasionally turns around in the front seat of ye olde station wagon and says "you'd better stop that right now, because if i have to stop this car and come back there, you'll be sorry" and the rest of the time we just keep the fighting down to (bloodless) dull roar. but if you have a better system in mind you should propose it; and if you can't get traction for it inside nanog, there's always room for another ops list. (in Usenet days we used to say "could you move this thread to $other_group, where it will be on-topic, and where i'm not a subscriber?" and it WORKED a lot of the time, just to wake folks up and show that topic-consensus was a property both nec'y and desireable in ALL forums, digital or otherwise.)