Off Topic Posts

[Michael Hudson]

Mikael Olofsson <mikael at isy.liu.se> writes:

> I could do without the flame wars.  During the last three months the 
> number of posts have steadily increased from ~500 posts a week with very
> few inflammatory posts to ~1000 posts a week with a significant part 
> being inflammatory. The last week there were ~150 post that I consider 
> being part of flame wars (whitespace, brackets, python sucks, and 
> related). I admit, I have posted a handful of these. Of course I can 
> filter them out, but I refuse to make new filters every day just to cope 
> with digital bullshit. 

I agree that the last week has been a bit silly. But these things tend
to come and go, in my experience. I don't think the amount of
flame-age is increasing generally. Any good newsreader should have a
quick way of marking a thread as read (M-C-k in gnus), so if a thread
is clearly out of control, bin it.

> And what if I the increase continues? I say split, maybe even to more 
> than two groups. 

Well, as I world probably read them all this wouldn't affect me that
much. But I'm not convinced it would help, either.

> Or perhaps, make it moderated.

The newsgroup is NO WAY NEAR as bad as it would need to be to make
moderation a good idea (IMHO) - that's an option that should be
reserved for monsters like comp.object, comp.lang.c++ or
comp.lang.perl.  Maybe we'll be there one day, but we're not there
yet. I'm happy enough with the status quo.

Cheers,
Michael