(urth) crackdown 2.0

[Jeff Wilson]

On 6/8/2010 10:21 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 12:56 AM, Jeff Wilson<jwilson at io.com>  wrote:
>> I do not feel it right for you to expect everyone else to modify their
>> behavior to suit your reading preferences.
>
> I see. Will you be extending your little anarchist free speech crusade
> to the *entirety* of netiquette? Or just the parts that people bring
> up?

Yes, the pro-moderation anarchist, that's me.

>>> This is also officially encouraged behavior.  Think of it as a
>>> bureaucratic filing system - even if the topic of discussion drifts,
>>> keeping the subject the same helps keep the thread of thought
>>> together.
>>
>> Wait a minute - just two weeks ago you said "It's a good idea to edit the
>> subject line of a discussion to reflect the topic being discussed" - which
>> is it?
>
> There's nothing inconsistent here, except in your head.
>
> I asked you offlist to look at the list of threads for just June and
> tell me whether you thought each and every one was a genuine subject
> edit in response to a topic change. You didn't. So I'll provide an
> example from http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2010-June/thread.html

I didn't see any offlist messages from you, sorry.

> What topic change, pray tell, is signaled by switching from
> 'travelling north' to 'Urth Digest, Vol 70, Issue 15'?

That's a consequence of the list owner allowing digest mode to the 
people who habitually overlook the part of each digest that says 
something substantially similar to "When replying, please edit your 
Subject line so it is more specific than 'Re: Contents of GurpsNet-L 
digest...'" The list software is more than capable of being used to hold 
those people accountable for their oversights without penalizing 
everyone else.

I mean, digest mode has it uses, but aside from the subject mangling it 
also fubars the message threading that would make life much easier for 
you by letting you blacklist a conversation and never see replies in it 
ever again, regardless of what their subject lines say. *That* is not 
just a crime against notional nettiquette but violates internet 
technology standards as well as creating technical problems for people 
with strong presentation preferences like yourself.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >