too much O.T. <Correcting some misconceptions>Andydendum

[Andy Rudoff]

>Andy -
>
>As I wrote to Jim Ellis recently, people want to go where everyone knows 
>your name.  These lists represent a community.  The idea, I think, is to be 
>able to have these conversations with people you know.

This is an excellent point.  When someone posts an off topic joke
to pianotech, they are often doing so because they know the people
on pianotech and they think those folks will get a chuckle from
what they post.  Sending the same content to some list provided by
yahoo or MSN might make the message exactly on-topic, but you're
posting to strangers.

Over the years, pianotech seems to tolerate a certain level of
off-topic posts.  The occasional quick, witty remark, or some
news that someone just wants to share.  Once the volume of these
off topic posts reaches a certain level, people start complaining.
Of course, the amount of it that is acceptable is completely
subjective and different people have different thresholds.

>I think it would be much easier for anyone  to call "point of order" to 
>move a discussion to the OT list if it was available.

We have the ptg.org domain name, and we have the PTG server.  We can
make as many lists as we like (there are actually 54 PTG lists right now,
because we use the same list software to provide many of the closed
lists like the ones used for our committees).

So, if folks think that creating a pianotech-OT list (or whatever
you want to call it) is a good idea, it only takes a few minutes
to create it.  You have to take the good with the bad, though.
We might indeed decrease some of the long-running off-topic threads
but we'll probably increase the number of threads debating whether
something should be moved to the other list, explaining the other
list to people, or slamming people for not using the OT list.  But
if we want to try creating pianotech-OT, I'm game.

>I think you point out the reasons why moderating Pianotech is not workable.

Actually, I think it is workable if we could find someone willing to
try being moderator (your point might be that we'd never find such a
person, and you may be right about that).

The idea is that pianotech itself would not change, but there
would be a second list, pianotech-m, that you could subscribe
to instead that would only contain what the moderator approved.
So if you want to read the raw content, you would subscribe to
pianotech, and if you wanted to read what the moderator provides,
you subscribe to pianotech-m.  This helps avoid heavy scrutiny on
what the moderator is choosing to let through, since people can
always go look at the raw content if they want to read the rest of
some thread that degenerated into something the moderator thought
was uninteresting.

The trick is finding someone willing to take the time to do the moderation,
but that is not unheard of.  If someone did it for a month or two, until
they felt they really understood the task, they could then train a few
others to do it and take turns.  We run the PTG server this way: I
spent a few years getting it the way I wanted it, then I showed the
rest of the ECC how it works and now we all take turns handling the
administrative tasks (and much to the ECC's credit, it is really
working wonderfully).

-andy