Theos-Talk Archives (February 1998 Message tt00372)

Catherine:

>Could the list be broken down into categories perhaps?  This may facilitate
>sorting of subject matter.  It would permit people with special needs or focus
>to pinpoint them and not waste time on extraneous material.  Some of the
>subjects are misleading and forces one to read the content before realizing
>it's not useful to the reader.

The automatic support for topics is handled by listserv mailing lists,
and theos-talk uses majordomo. The reason is primarily economic, it
costs thousands of dollars a year for a web provider to offer a
listserv mailing list facility, so I can't convince my webservice
provider to switch. Majordomo lists, though, don't cost them anything
to provide, so I'm able to get theos-talk for free (no additional
charge over my monthly charge for the web account).

It would, as you say, be nice if someone looked over messages, labelled
and rated them, then sent them on, allowing people to only get the
messages of types they were interested in. And there have been a
number of people dropping theos-talk because of the mixed nature of
the postings, and because they have so much to wade through before
seeing what they like.

Because there are no controls on the postings of people, and because
there will always be new people, unfamiliar with any voluntary
conventions that we might come up with, there will always be
postings that may be unconventional for the list, that may a bit
of messages for us to wade through. The only thing that would solve
the problem, potentially, would be if the list was moderated, and
the moderator labelled and passed on the messages. The people on the
list could, in the absence of mailing-list features to allow people
to subscribe by topic, have an email filter on the subject line to
discard all messages not having the labels that they wanted. This
is, though, labor intensive, and there would need to be some volunteer
to spend an hour a day, day-after-day, and a backup when the volunteer
was unavailable or sick. Even where someone suitable appear with the
time and dedication to do this, people would still be unhappy at times
at the labels attached to their messages, since the labelling of
messages would be a judgement call, and subject to differing
interpretations.

The best thing that we can do at the moment is -- as participants
on the list -- to make sure our subject line is descriptive, to
cut out long quotes, and to get to the point early on in our
message, allowing readers the change to quickly decide to keep or
<DELETE> it without a lot of browsing.

-- Eldon