Brief Analysis Time frame: Roughly one week from "RE: IPCop v1.4.5 Configuration" 5/3/2005 3:59AM to "Re: Politics was Re: OT: Let's hear it for the activist judges!" 5/9/2005 8:43 PM (The last message before I started this thread. Classification basis: Just counting the subject field to classify message as "on" or "off" topic. Total emails: 190, 100% On: 123, 65% Off (FS, hardware only or computer related, etc.): 34, 18% Off: 33, 17% (Percentages rounded. Disagreement over "on" or "off" status may exsist, especially for the "Off but computer related" catagory. This is just a quick judgment call on my part based on stated subject.) OK. That was one week before the first "stop OT posts" requests came in. OT posts were significant ( > 15% ) for some time prior to that. I think that shows that the list is highly tolerant of OT posts since it took a while before any moderating comments were posted. This is good. I am not advocating a strict policy. I don't think moderation will happen (time and spam) so a strict policy would not be enforced anyway. I like brief OT conversations and occasionally start them myself. I am advocating a reasonable maintainance of the purpose of the plug-discuss list. That is "a mailing list that you can join to ask or answer questions, and talk about linux stuff." Being that it is a Linux User Group, the topic is Linux and things related to it. This email list is one of The BEST on the internet. I have looked and found very few to compare with the insights, knowledge, responsiveness and tolerance that members of this list create. We can be proud of that. Let's just keep it up! Alan --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss