Handling Politics the plug-discuss way?

[Bob Elzer]

I've just been deleting the topic on sight. But that is more work than
should be necessary.

This is one reason I thought it would be better to go to a forum.

With a forum, if the thread goes off course, it can split and moved to the
correct Subject.

The thread could also be locked if it gets out of hand.

But best of all when I go to the forum, I see what's new, and I can ignore
all the threads I don't have
an interest in, and when I'm done mark them all read.

Using a forum cuts down on all the unwanted email being sent to everyone.

You can still have mail sent to you for topics that you post in.

Not sure how everyone else feels, but I would prefer if this was a forum.

Then we can get teamspeak going to replace IRC :P   :-)





  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us 
> [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On 
> Behalf Of Ryan Rix
> Sent: Sunday, August 02, 2009 10:21 PM
> To: plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> Subject: OT: Handling Politics the plug-discuss way?
> 
> 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
> 
> * LG loves czech girls.
> <vincent> LG: do they have additional interesting "features" 
> other girls don't have? ;)
> 	-- #Debian
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