"Mortimer Schnerd, RN" wrote:

Guy Alcala wrote:
Why wouldn't you? Are you a troll or loon, do you continuously post
off-topic crap while providing no valauble on-topic content, are incapable of
reasoned debate so instead spew personal insults, find it impossible to
maintain basic standards of civil discourse, are you a spammer? If you can
answer no to all of the above (and the moderator has no evidence to the
contrary), you'd be in. You're not trying to make such a group elitists
only, just trying to screen out the more obnoxious wasters of bandwidth.

I am reminded of my father's experiences with the WWII moderated newsgroup.
He's been edited out on several occasions because his postings didn't fit the
tightly mandated quote/new material specifications. I can remember on one
occasion where he was edited out because he replied to somebody else's OT post,
even thought the original OT post made it through.

The moderator in question was an academic by trade and a bureaucrat by tendency.
My father was, OTOH, a veteran. It would seem to me he might have something to
offer that group. Not so, according to their moderator.

That's why I don't, as a general rule, subscribe to moderated groups. Besides,
I wouldn't belong to any club that'd have me as a member. G

None of which applies to a restricted-subscription mailing list (group) with no
moderator passing judgement on posts in advance. There is no "moderator" such as
you describe above for such a group, just an administrator. There is _no_ vetting
of posts in advance, none. The sole control such an adminstrator has over posts is
to suspend/ban the poster from making further posts.

Personally, while I certainly agree that quoting a several hundred line post only to
append "Me too" is a waste of bandwidth, I can see no need to impose strict
guidelines -- common sense and when necessary, gentle reminders should be enough.
More often than not such reminders (often less than gentle) will be made by the
other posters, as happens on r.a.m. now. If setting such limits is considered
necessary then they can always be negotiated, but again, they seem completely
unnecessary to me given the nature of such a group.

ISTM that your freservations are based on both a misconception of the nature of such
a group, as well as the experience of dealing with a moderator into empire-building.
None of the groups I've subscribed to suffers from such problems, both because the
whole set-up eliminates most such problems, and because the moderators are
enthusiasts themselves, who are endowed with common sense and who are well-balanced
enough not to need to be "Yertle the Turtle" on some discussion list.

In any case this all appears to be moot, as it appears that most people are willing
to ride out the chaff storm rather than bail.

Guy