Well put; This whole flame war kept my blackberry vibrating off the hook and drained my battery in half the usual time. We all have better things to spend our time on and even better ways to further our wonderfully diverse causes than an internet arguement. Sent from my BlackBerry Smartphone provided by Alltel -----Original Message----- From: "der.hans" Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 11:43:26 To: quatsch Subject: do NOT feed the trolls moin moin, once again, I get an appropriate random sig quote for the email. Flame wars like this are easy to avoid. First and foremost, don't respond to trolling. The original post in the thread was completely off-topic and merely a troll post. I'm not characterizing the poster as a troll, just that one post. Ignoring the post would have been sufficient and appropriate. That goes for both people who agree with the post and people who disagree with it. Secondly, if you find yourself in a flame war and absolutely needing to respond, sit on it for a while. Give yourself a cool down period before posting. Thirdly, for every post, please consider how it will be received. This goes quintuply for posts into flame wars, especially in a limited medium like email. Does your post actually add content? Does it add name-calling or other inappropriate fuel to the fire? If it's doing the latter, please take time to remove the fuel. There is no need to attack anyone on this list! We have a variety of opinions on politics, religions and gastronomy in the group. We also a variety of opinions on far more important topics like editors, mail clients and programming languages :). That's all fine. Fourthly, ignore threads and posts you don't care about. This isn't about having thick skin, it's just time management :). I do appreciate those who try to read all messages, which I have also done in the past. But, if something just has no value to you please feel free to ignore it. Fifthly, realize that discussions are generally a good thing. Airing opionions and getting different perspectives is actually one of the values of PLUG. We just need to try to keep them constructive and factual. Listing good features of your favorite $application is good. Listing actual failings of $other_application is also good, e.g. editors that behave badly and wipe out files when the filesystem fills up. I personally don't appreciate the timing on the flame war. I spent Tuesday night doing something productive, helping with election monitoring. Now, rather than writing up what I observed as I was supposed to, I need to deal with an off-topic flame war. Most of the rest of you can just ignore it. If you don't like the thread use your mail client to ignore the thread or add a filter or just do like I did and skip all the mail with the flame war's thread. As one of the people who works to keep PLUG working I can't just ignore the flame war's consequences. We are a volunteer group with very few volunteers keeping things running. I find myself in a position of needing to find a technical solution to a social problem. Not a good position. We are always completely open to other volunteers helping out! Even with more volunteers we will be dependent on the PLUG community being considerate of others. There's no practical way we can keep up with dedicated attempts to cause problems. We depend on the community self-regulating. The community, in turn, depends on individuals to self-regulate. It's easy to have a destructive influence. Citizenship is striving to have a constructive influence. I know I sometimes fail in this, but I certainly try. I hope this email is taken as an attempt to be constructive. ciao, der.hans -- # http://www.LuftHans.com/ http://www.LuftHans.com/Classes/ # Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. -- Thomas Jefferson --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss