In need of c.l.p.discussion

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Thu Oct 16 17:38:29 EDT 2003


Rune Steffensen wrote:

> Really? It works quite nice in the no.* hierarchy, if not always, it
> DO
> reduce the noise.

This is not the no.* hierarchy.  This is either the Big Eight, or a
mailing list.

> Well, see above.
> We don't need reliability: if just a couple of people in a thread
> takes
> responsiblity the mess would be considerably reduced.

That sounds dubious.  I can only imagine that on the Big Eight such a
policy would devolve into constant crossposting between the two groups. 
There'd be no way to stop it, and trying to move a thread from one to
the other would always result in some people crossposting to both
(either because they don't want it moved since they don't read the other
group or to be difficult).  Without moderation there would be no way to
enforce this, and there is no policy in place to change the moderation
status of Big Eight groups.

In effect, what you ask for is already the way things work. 
Announcements are for comp.lang.python.announce (moderated), and
discussion is for comp.lang.python (unmoderated).  You're just in the
wrong newsgroup :-).

> About _python_ yes, not about lisp or scheme.

A far better solution to your problem -- namely avoiding threads you do
not want to see -- is to just use a killfile.  Even really lousy
newsreaders, like the one I still use, tend to have "ignore thread"
abilities.  When the Lisp/Scheme chatter started up, I just ignored the
thread and never saw it again.

Further, as other people have pointed out, what you consider
"information" vs. "discussion" is a subjective call, just like it would
be for everybody.

What you're trying to do is impose your subjective wishes on a
community.  It is true that comp.lang.python has rather high traffic,
but even fragmentation isn't going to drastically change that; if you
subscribe to the newsgroup/mailing list, you know what you're deal with.

So the proper solution here for you is to simply use your newsreader to
filter out the threads that you don't want to read.  The type of
filtering you want is much better done on a per-reader basis, not
globally.

-- 
   Erik Max Francis && max at alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
 __ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && &tSftDotIotE
/  \ There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.
\__/  John Ciardi




More information about the Python-list mailing list