A geek out of control, trying to force one method of mailing list replies

Categories: Geekdom

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Published on: January 16, 2006

I was a member of a mailing list called wpascanner on yahoo groups. The guy that is the moderator of it decided that he wanted all replies to be “bottom posting” I informed him that it is a bad idea to force issues like that, he responded basically “Subject not open to debate” talk about a geek with to much power. I told him to subscribe me from the list, not that I have anything against bottom posting, I have things against people forcing their world view on people. He talked about in the original “official Internet standards” unfortunately there is no official Internet standard for how to post a reply to a e-mail, I know there are holy wars over it. I know some one on WPLUG’s mailing list suggested it, and it got shot down, in fact it was suggested that after we get a posting method for replays we could go on to getting world peace going. I guess you can force any mailing list into a posting methods if you run it with an iron fist, but the problem with that is you will not have many people posting, there is already talk on the TRAMA list, that they do not force a person to post on way or the other, I wonder which list will last longer now, the wpascanner list is starting a death spiral now, you can not run a list with an iron fist and expect people to be happy with it. He also is demanding no HTML email posts. He is demanding people to fix their outlook setting just for that list. Some one pointed out that for other lists, that could cause problems, if they have different “standards”.
See here for a debate on it over at WPLUG as some one tryed to get a standard for wplug, but failed.

Michael P. O'Connor

A geek out of control, trying to force one method of mailing list replies