At 11:12 PM 1/9/99 -0000, Samael <samael@dial.pipex.com> wrote:
>>The fist is a post per day per member maximum. This could be, say,
>>three posts per day. By doing this, I think people who chime in on
>>everything would choose what to respond to more wisely.
>
>Hmm, I can respond to an opinion on Dyson, or the comment about
>singularities, or the one regarding new methods of uploading - but not all
>of them! Which one is more important! Damn! I already replied to a post
>this morning, so I can't reply to this one that's just arrived in response
>to it!
that would be the case with such rules in effect. Well, if the owner agreed to a three post maximum.
>>The second is a limit on the size of each post. This enforce trimming
>>posts, so that members don't quote the whole post, but only the part
>>they wish to respond to.
>
>I try to do this, but frequently (especially in a cogently argued post)
>there is not enough context unless you include several layers of argument
>back to the original post
Seeing your above example, I noticed you could've trimmed words -- such as "already," etc. -- without losing much meaning.
>>A problem with this is that combined with the post per day limit, the
>>length of a member's daily contribution would be very limited. Even
>>so, if someone has something lenthy to post, he or she could post
>>a (temporary?) URL with the material or ask members to email him
>>or her for copies of it.
>
>I'm not sure what the problem with list verbiage is. I would like to try
>and keep subject lines relevant when topics change during conversation (so
>people can ignore those threads they aren't interested in), but I'm
>interested in seeing as many opinions as possible, so I don;t see a problem
>with many posts. Similarly with emails, I'd prefer that each one was long,
>but stand-alone (so that when it arrives I can read it as a single argument
>and not have to go back through my deleted folder to try and find the email
>it's a reply to in order to understand it).
Valid point, and a good argument against too small of a size limit.
>I do think that sometimes this sort of thing might work better as a
>newsgroup (we do appear to have the volume) and if I had a permanent
>connection to the net (as soon as ADSL comes in) I would run a news server
>with a couple of news groups on it.
I still believe we should try my suggestions, even if only for a few weeks. After that, we can keep (one or both of) them or go back to the old way of doing things. Such a brief trial would, I think, give us a chance to see if quality goes up or down without doing much damage if the latter.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://www.mcs.net/~tshell/ust/homepage.htm