people wanting to join a mailing list from the jakarta list have to go through two pages to get the actual lists in order to try to reduce the need for people to police the list guidelines. but this doesn't seem to be enough. we still get people posting who haven't taken the time or effort to read what's been created to help them.
jon started taking a lot of the responsibility for policing very soon after the change from [EMAIL PROTECTED] to [EMAIL PROTECTED] he started off with elan and humour but over the years his responses got shorter and more curt as it became a chore. hence the jon.html which had to be used when people took it too personally.
one problem which has become apparent over the last year or so is that jakarta lists are very widely mirrored - including onto news. this means that people post to our lists never having read the list guidelines or (as has happened in a couple of cases) not even realizing that they are on a mailing list.
there is one particular flame war that i remember. someone asked a tomcat question. i quite politely offered a possible solution but told them to ask on the tomcat list since that's where all the experts hang out. this descended quickly into a hideous flame war.
the poster had no idea that he was on a list with rules and took it as a personal insult that i'd suggested that he should read the rules and take his question elsewhere. i am of the opinion that life's too short to waste talking to people like that and so i left him to rot but unfortunately his replies were so strongly worded that he drew the collective wrath of the jakarta community down upon his head. he didn't have the good sense to stop arguing and the flame war went on for several days with numerous posts. until finally he quite vocally quit the list.
this is the context in which to understand (and judge) love.html and idiot.
html. they are informative and offensive. posting one of those urls to someone who is out of line on a list is a very effective way of policing. it is also very harsh. i personally think that people deserve a chance and that strong responses lead to other people being too frightened to post.
but i'm not sure how much more can be done. the lists are so busy that they have to be policed.
it'd be a good idea to come up with some better solutions. maybe we could increase the size of the email footers so that it'd be more obvious that you're reading a post to an apache list and that the list has certain rules which are supposed to be obeyed.
- robert
On Tuesday, October 29, 2002, at 03:08 PM, Martin van den Bemt wrote:
I'm guessing Jon mailed people the URL as a list moderator.
The first time I saw it used was when someone asked a tomcat question on general and was kindly requested to take his question to the tomcat list. He replied : I'm on the correct list, so why don't you answer me.. Then jon replied with his url. After that it happend one more time afaik, which was an immidiate reply with the url. ;) (probably the previous issue still remained in memory..) Just search on love.html and idiot.html to follow the discussion we had about it on the general list..;)
Mvgr, Martin
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