Re: Brad's policies

[Dan Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:57 AM 3/1/00 -0500, William Swallow wrote:
>You asked us to speak up and I took your offer...
>
>If you want to run your own free list, go for it. With big lists
>comes the need for some measure of control. Otherwise it'd be hard to spot
>the on-topic posts.
======================================================
But the problem is that the quality of list service and related list
management issues are legitimate topics. He suppresses any posts to the list
that relate to these topics, and, though he says the proper course of action
is to contact him off-list, he ignores those off-list complaints, and
regards them as "hate mail" (his words in a post he made today). 
=============================================================
>I run several lists myself, and one is quickly growing. Sure, I find the
>need to police it every now and again. It's the only way to keep things on
>topic. And ya know what, most people are thankful for that policing, as most
>people have a decent amount of work to get done and can't afford the time to
>sift through volumes of garbage to get to a small nugget of information that
>may or may not help them.
====================================================================
But that's exactly the situation now with the BradList. The vast majority of
the posts are garbage--recurring posts about a relatively small group of
problems ad nauseum: How to generate a TOC or index, conditional text
issues, autonumbering problems, problems with producing PDF, issues about
which graphic formats are best, "fuzzy" graphics, etc. And the people who
raise these recurrent topics are failing to find the "nuggets" that would
answer their questions before they post them to the list because it's too
difficult for them to weed through all the chaff.

The vast majority of the 2400 BradList subscribers are lurkers who never
post anything. Presumably, they weed through the posts looking for those
nuggets. The second category includes the ones whose posts mainly ask for
help (usually help on the recurrent topics described above). The third (and
smallest) category are people knowledgeable about FrameMaker who are looking
for the occasional new nugget of information, and who also are willing to
offer help to those in the second category. The people in this third
category are also the ones who produce most of the nuggets.

If the relatively small number of people in that third category 
start to revolt (by unsubscribing or becoming lurkers instead of
participants), the list collapses, because there are no more nuggets, and no
more help for the ones who need it.

     ====================
     | Nullius in Verba |
     ====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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