MODERATION, etc.

[Eric Bohlman]

On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Tim Bray wrote:

> Actually, I like seeing job postings here.  It's good solid information
> about what's going on in the world.  I also don't mind seeing press
> releases about new products or projects.

I'm OK with the job postings as long as they're by principals only
(recruiter ads don't carry much information, and also rival recruiters
feel compelled to compete over who can dump the most database entries into
the forum; this sort of competition made the Usenet jobs forums pretty
much useless).  New product announcements are fine with me, but should be
one-time-only; we have excellent resources (e.g. Robin Cover's and James
Tauber's) for finding out about existing products.

As for other moderation policy, I think it's useful for a moderator to be
able to say at some point "this thread has been going on for two weeks
without anything new being said.  Therefore, this topic will be closed
five days from now and only messages saying something new will be posted
after that."  This works especially well if there's a companion,
unmoderated list to which closed topics can be moved.

Oh, and one of the duties of the moderator should be to keep quoted
detritus (mail headers, .sigs, trailer messages from free mailing
services, etc.) off the list.  This list has been good so far; OTOH,
reading XSL-List is almost painful for me because nearly every post (I
read it in digest form) has practically the whole thread, detritus and
all, quoted at the end.


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