OT: Handling Politics the plug-discuss way?

[Ryan Rix]

Group,

Are these political discussions (examples: the second half of Re: Guess 
What, when I relabelled unsuccesfully, and whatever happened to the 
Geeky/entrepreneurial thread) detracting from the point of this list (which 
is to discuss GNU/Linux and Free Software, and not necessarily to discuss 
the economy, the government, or conspiracies about whether or not our duly 
elected President was an American or not) and in general daunting for people 
who may be new listers/Linuxers?

Hans agrees with me (via a quick discussion in the IRC channel) that these 
discussions in general detract from the list, and make the non-political-
flame-war discussions less active/less... what is the word... visible, so I 
think that something should be done, or at least a discussion should take 
place about it.

I see a few options:
1) We leave it here and do nothing. Most email clients have the ability to 
filter on subject/topic of a discussion, so those who didn't want to 
see/deal with/get drug into these discussions could easily filter them out. 
We could create a new topic heading, like we have for OT: (politics: or 
something, when someone posts something politically kinda sorta related), 
allowing those who want to take part in these discussions to do so, while 
the others are safely shielded from them. The problem with this is that new 
users will still see these discusions taking place, which could, imo be very 
detrimental to their joining this community/getting the help with a question 
they may need/just feeling comfortable. But of course, this is easy enough 
to do and leaves the work for the users who don't like said discussions to 
take care of.

2) Create another list for these mails. The problem with this idea is that 
(imo) mailman has no easy way to control WHERE messages between two 
different lists go, so I think that it could be hard to transition between 
the two lists when a discussion does eventually go OT-Political. This would 
rely mostly on the good will and rememberance of the posters, which in the 
experience of the last few OT-Political threads has given me the impression 
that this will NOT work.

3) We moderate OT threads. My personal opinion is that the best way to keep 
flame wars down is to moderate. Not so much eliminate the posts that may 
incite these political discussions but to put a long enough delay on the 
posts that it hampers the quick reply-reply-reply-reply that usually is what 
completely derails thoughtful discussion. If users are given the instant 
chance to write a quick retort to a discussion and have that instantly 
posted to a hundred people who may or may not have the same idealogy 
basically causes a thread to go haywire in a matter of hours. With a 
sufficient delay in these posts being sent to the group, this haywiring can 
be pushed out to a day or two, hopefully alleviating any flame wars which 
may develop. Most of the wars that take place on p-d are about a day or two 
long at most anyways.

4) We forbid it. I think that this is the WORST option, but an option 
nonetheless. I am not in favor of censorship at all, but if things get bad 
enough we could do this. It would probably have to fall back to #3.

My personal preference is #3, but that gives someone an extra job, and I 
don't think Hans should have to do it himself. A board of moderators be 
elected perhaps? Is there any way to crowdsource it? If this was a forum 
rather than a mailing list (which I don't support at all!) we could add a 
score/rating system, but I don't think that this is possible via e-mail.

Thanks and best,
Ryan Rix

-- 
---
Ryan Rix
(623)-826-0051

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<vincent> LG: do they have additional interesting "features" other girls 
don't have? ;)
	-- #Debian

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