From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Thu Sep 19 2002 - 15:18:44 MDT
mdwalker@quickclic.net wrote:
> I have a suggestion that is a modification of one I made a few months back
> on the Ex list about how to manage the list volume. Suppose a voluntary
> system of categorizing messages was
> instituted in terms of the relevance to transhumanism and extropianism.
It's not a bad suggestion, and indeed there are several things we can
voluntarily do to markup posts so as to facilitate productive
discussion. For example, we could mark paragraphs with
<salient></salient> tags and agree that responses to points outside the
salient content be given a new subject name.
The mailing list software could assign codes to threads, such that
initiated threads get the code after the subject line, while non-salient
responses are made into subthreads that get the originating subject code
prefixed to the subject.
Example:
subject: War with Iraq
becomes, when distributed,
subject: War with Iraq [GDHTB]
subthreads are named using the code as a prefix
subject: [GDHTB] Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
When distributed, the last subject could be changed to:
subject: [GDHTB] Iraqi weapons of mass destruction [JDHYT]
Whereupon non-salient responses to that thread become a new subject:
subject: [JDHYT] Does Iraq have nukes?
and of course when distributed gets a new code:
subject: [JDHYT] Does Iraq have nukes? [ABCGG]
Enforcement could be provided by list members, with quoting restricted
to the salient paragraphs, and individual list members could call out
responses that do not adhere to the format (whereupon they become
deleted from the archives).
Of course, there are other methods to mark message trails, and indeed
there is one in place using the javien version of the list at
http://forum.javien.com/conversations.php?goend=true&topicdata=extropians
Perhaps a better approach would be to eliminate the mailing list
altogether (or at least responses to the list) and use some other bbs or
blog-like software (perhaps slash, for example).
Personally I subscribe to the digest, but rarely read it anymore and use
the Extropy BBS to read and normal email to respond.
-Mike
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