Tanstaafl wrote:
> If this garbage OT crap ('sad but true Linux sucks', and 'Hey Humans
> I'm a machine') is typical of this list,It varies from season to season. Although often it feels like the September That Never Ended. There are more than 2,000 plus subscribers to debian-user. Imagine if it were a physical town hall style meeting with that many people in one location. How many of those meetings in real life remain on topic and with a high signal to noise ratio? Very few of the ones I have actually attended. Everyone wants to talk about the issues that are important to them and everyone has a different set of issues. Imagine again if every one of those people could speak without any limitation. Or rather the only limitation is each person's own discipline. That is basically what we have here. A small number of participants without discipline. In many ways it is a problem due to its own success that it is so popular and there are so many participants. That we only have a few problems is actually pretty good given the large number of subscribers. > is there a debian related list that doesn't allow such crap to go on > and on and on and on and on and on ad nauseum? No. The only way to do this would be to set up a moderated mailing list. And then with the volume of mail it would be overwhelming to most moderators. It would definitely require a team. And to set this up would require a large change in culture. From a completley free spirited one to one that required proctoring. Cultural changes come hard. Personally I find it interesting that one of the biggest off-topic posters often complains that another mailing list for another distro became moderated. But given the actions I think many of us would vote for that moderation here to control the off-topic postings. > If it is typical, and there is no other option for list based debian > support, I guess its time to start building another kill file. You won't be the first nor the last to hack up a killfile. But execution of a killfile is complicated and difficult. You really want to kill an entire thread. Because when the trolling is particularly successful many people post into these long running threads. Even I am not without fault. It really should be integrated into the mail reader so that you could kill by a combination of posters and subjects and that would be persistent across days as new messages arrive. My personal technique is to keep all of the messages specifically so that I can recognize one of those threads and then quickly mark the entire thread including subject changes as read (C-r in mutt) and move on. If I deleted messages it would break the threads and I would have to wade through all of the broken off sub-threads individually. In the most recent long running off topic thread there were 87 messages posted by 29 different addresses. Trying to killfile to reduce the noise there would require a large number of addresses some of which usually post reasonable stuff most of the time. Really this needs better mailer support. Something like a scoring system where one could score good quality posters higher and reduce the noise from low quality posters. (Of course gnus comes to mind since it has scoring. I am not currently using it but perhaps I should try it again.) I will mention the wiki page of mailing list posting rules. Maybe a few will read it. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMailingLists#Posting_Rules.2C_Guidelines.2C_and_Tips Good luck! If you come up with a magic recipe please share it with the rest of us. Bob
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