People will join the list, people will leave the list. Some of them will let the list know why they left (as in this case) and some of them will either just stop participating or leave without any word at all. It's sad to hear that people are leaving the list for any reason, but to leave because "others" are not being professional boarders on the silly side of things and is more in the line of a tantrum and could have been handled a bit more professionally.
There are many ways to selectively weed out the things you don't want to participate in. I like MailWasher (not a plug, but I do use it) to weed out things automatically, but for the most part I just ignore as much of the stuff I disagree with as I can, but in some cases I have also been upset by things. I didn't quit, and I tried not to throw a tantrum. I just slacked off in my participation a bit. I decided that some people have nothing better to do and it's not really my thing to try to "fix" them. I didn't bother telling anyone that I was slacking off for two reasons, 1) it's no one's business but my own, and 2) I think it would be just as unprofessional to throw a tantrum and then quit as the posts that made me want to quit in the first place. If people desire to quit, whatever their reason, they have every right to do so. If they want to lay the blame it on someone or a group, then they have the right to do that. I don't think it's a good thing to do because (for me) that falls into unprofessional territory, and I completely disagree with making a "grand exit statement", but I still have to defend their right to be unprofessional. If I were the moderator, I would have killed a lot of off-topic and unprofessional threads along the way, but I also would have killed this one at the very beginning. People are always going to go "off topic" from time to time, some people more than others. If the group were better moderated, possibly that would not happen (as much), but it will still happen. I'm not complaining about the moderation of the group, in fact, I don't even know who the moderator is or if there is one. For better or worse, there are very few qualifications necessary to "join" this group. Certainly everyone should know that up front, and the group has been pretty good (from time to time) in self moderating. Some things, like explicit language or explicit marketing are frowned upon and in some cases dealt with appropriately. Do people go overboard sometimes (or a lot)? Of course they do, and in most (if not all) cases, they might actually feel like they have a point to make. One would hope that it's in some small way at least a technical or professional point, but you can't always have what you hope for. :) In any case, when someone wants to leave because of the attitude of "others", it frequently is just a mask for some "other thing" that has happen in the past, and the "others" referred to could have just been the "final straw". I would advise people to just back away a little and see if things get better, but if they are persistent in their desire to leave the list, then it's their right to do so. Having people on this list snipe at anyone or any other group for causing someone to leave is just as unprofessional and inappropriate as the thing they are accusing the "other people" of doing to "cause" the person to want to leave. That said, if someone wants to leave the list, then they should leave. I they disagree with the way it is moderated, then either offer to participate in the moderation, or walk away. They can even start their own list, I would certainly look at joining it, I might not like it enough to stay, but I would not condemn the list just because some minor subset is unprofessional. I also would not blast the entire list because of one or a few people. The funny thing is that I just today saw an entry that someone thought that the assembler list might be defunct because they have not heard anything from them in a while. It's true that there is a lot less "stuff" going on in that list, and less of it tends to be "off topic", but it still happens. On that list people just tend to treat threads differently than on this list. They do tend to be more on-topic, and that reduces the number of discussions. However, many of the people on that list are also on this list. So, I have rambled on long enough and I probably haven't really even gotten my point across, which is that just about this entire thread should not have been started. Parting shots at work and on this list, or any list, are never a good idea, because the actual problem that "might" exist is never going to be handled by throwing a tantrum. That only works for 3 year olds and many for people on TV. :) (that was a joke). I know that a lot of people are considered unprofessional or even jerks on this list, I might even be one of them, but the worse thing you can do with something happening which is unprofessional is to react unprofessionally. It doesn't ever make things better. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
