From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 13:12:30 MDT
--- "E. Shaun Russell" <e_shaun@extropy.org> wrote:
> Alex Ramonsky wrote:
>
> >But who reads the abuser's posts? Who replies to them? If nobody
> does, the
> >abuser may as well not exist.
>
> This is along the lines of what I do for list overpostings, and it
> has, for
> the most part, worked. However, the response from the main
> abuser(s?) has
> been rather vitriolic, to say the least. I don't like the idea of
> censorship at all, but I think that most folks who have been on this
> list
> for a number of years (such as myself) have seen that a very minor
> amount
> of list governance is necessary.
Assuming that I am one of the individuals being talked about (and I
thought being talked about behind one's back was offensive, being
talked about as if you aren't even here, but are, is doubly so), I'd
like to contribute my own suggestions for resolving both the
overposting problem and the problem of offensive posts.
First off, let us examine the actual situation: There are people who
many of us would like to hear more from, and those we'd like to hear
less from, yet we are all limited to 8 posts per day in a system that
is fraught with problems.
One problem with the posting limit is that it is counted from the
Pacific Time Zone of the western US. If I post 8 messages at 11 pm from
the east coast, and then one more at 1 am but no more for the rest of
that next day, I have violated the posting limits because in the
Pacific Time Zone I will be seen to have posted 9 times.
Similarly, if I post one message at 11 pm one day, but it is held up by
mail servers for several hours due to network interruptions, it is
counted against my count the next day, so I need to be aware of this
before I start posting 8 messages that next day.
Then you have the problem of keeping track of posts youve already made,
often from computers that are not your own, with a mail list that
doesn't send a message back out for 1-3 hours after it has been sent.
After I go through my first set of received messages, I hit 'check
mail' again to pick up any responses from people online and hopefully
to see how many messages I've already sent to the list. Because the
list doesnt send its messages back out at any speed one would expect in
the age of 2 gigahertz computers and broadband access, it is really
impossible to keep track of one's posts through the day.
Solutions:
1) Fix the majordomo to send messages out as soon as it's verified they
are list members sending them.
2) Utilize the ExI BBS 'karma' system to handicap how many posts each
list member has. If a member's posts are highly regarded by other
members, they will earn high karma and will be allowed to post more
than the average. Those who are disliked by the list will get negative
karma and lose post rations. Those who are REALLY disliked can thus be
shut up entirely by the overwhelming vote of the list members.
3) Set up an 'overdraft protection' post queuing system so that rather
than getting booted from the list for overposting, their overposts are
put into a buffer area and the member is notified they have messages in
the buffer that they can choose to have submitted to the list the next
day.
If these suggestions are followed completely, I think that all of these
problems with list conduct can be entirely alleviated.
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