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Folks,
About four hours ago, based on three inputs, I posted a message indicating
that I was deleting George M Irvine from this list. I explained my reasons
for this.
Unfortunately, one of my inputs: the actual messages that were causing
all the concern, was very much incomplete. Having realized this error,
and being now in possession of more complete facts, I am reversing my
earlier decission.
I am restoring George's membership of the list. I have sent him personal
email to this effect. I have apologized to him, and I apologize to him
in public here also.
The facts:
1. I have received a lot of email complaining about the quality of
the TechDiver list. These complaints have been increasing over
the last few weeks. Many complaints have been about George
specifically.
2. About 30% of the list's membership has unsubscribed this week.
3. Although I do not subscribe to the list directly myself, I do read
the list articles using the Web-Archive interface. Before I took
my earlier action, I had read to the end of the index. I had
thought I was up-to-date.
Unfortunately, a system error had caused the Archive's index not
to have been updated all week. I had not seen any of this week's
articles. I failed to notice the fact that the dates in the
archive had stopped incrementing. It was only after I took my
earlier decission that I saw email from someone about that, and
then realized the problem.
I have now corrected the problem. I've now also read up on the
recent messages, and I see that (in my own personal opinion)
recent postings are not at all offensive nor are they cause for
a censorship action.
As I said, I have therefore added George back to the list. I have
emailed him an apology. As someone who holds free speech as a very
important and fundamental right, I am embarrassed that I took the action
that I did.
The TechDiver list does still have problems:
A. There is an excessive volume of postings on the list.
About a year ago, I implemented a Web-Archive interface to
TechDiver. If you find the volume of postings too high, you can
unsubscribe, and you can read the list using the URL:
http://www.terra.net/mlist/aquanaut/techdiver
You need only read the articles that interest you.
B. Many poeple complain that there are a lot of postings with very
little informative content.
This is harder to solve. I have read several solutions:
- Make the list moderated
- Limit the number of messages forwarded per day
- Delay all messages by some fixed time period
- Form a newsgroup
- Just request folk to consider very carefully whether a
reply should go to the whole list, or just to the
original poster
I do not know what the best solution is. I will leave this
issue to those that have time for it.
I will say that, whatever the outcome of this whole issue is, I will
continue to provide resources for this or a future form of this list,
and I will continue to provide the Archive and Web interface services.
If anyone does form a Techincal Diving newsgroup or moderated list, I will
provide Archive and Web search tools for it, too.
My interest is to provide a forum for discussion of views. I hope
we continue to have such discussion.
No doubt this issue, and my actions, will provoke much debate. I urge
that if you have an issue with me, you send email to me, and not to
the list. Let's get the list back to Technical Diving subjects and
keep the flames away.
-jr
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