Do you have ideas for addressing the scaling problems of large
mailing lists?
You are referring only to discussion elists, right? Size shouldn't
matter to newsletters, e-zines, or announcements.
Moderation can help but it's frequently not practical. One thing I have
found that sometimes works is moving to a digest-by-size or
digest-by-time format.
Digest-by-content is thinly veiled moderation. When you do it by size
of the digest or frequency of digests it can be completely automated.
What the digest brings is throttling of the message flow. Those who
would "take over" an elist by getting the first, last, and as many words
in the middle as they can are often discouraged by digests.
Another suggestion that sometimes works is to spin off topic-based
elists. Organizations that use email for communication with their
customers/clients/participants use this very effectively. You keep the
main elist but you change its charter/purpose to say its only for
starting discussions and for discussions of short duration (you decide
how long is too long). All other discussions get moved to a new elist
to which those who wish to participate can and must join to do so.
This does require an owner to be "paying attention" since you need to be
able to easily create new elists and you need a process for shutting
down elists when they are no longer needed.
Jim
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