RE: [OT] Re: Banned on NANOG

["Joe Johnson" <jjohnson () jmdn net>]

I wanted to say the same thing earlier, but a hands-off approach works
best on NANOG.

The question at hand is not whether procmail will work . . .

It's whether procmail should have to work.



Joe Johnson 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog () merit edu [mailto:owner-nanog () merit edu] On Behalf Of
Paul Vixie
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2004 9:47 PM
To: nanog () merit edu
Subject: Re: [OT] Re: Banned on NANOG 


> From: Daniel Golding <dgolding () burtongroup com>
> ...
> Its entirely possible for nanog-l to be self policing, or, failing
> that, for users to simply use procmail on those who wander off-topic
> (for some definition of off-topic). Putting an [OT] subject banner on
> such posts is also nice.

i don't want widescale procmail to be the only way nanog@ is readable by
a big subset of the netops community, simply because i know a lot of the
folks here (lazy overworked disorganized bums, mostly) and if it takes
way more effort to be subscribed than not, many will just unsubscribe.

> There's such a thing as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
When
> highly clued, genuinely contributing folks are treated poorly for the
> occasional in-joke or comment, the S:N ratio will suffer in the longer
> term.

nope nope nope no-no-nope.  that's a subjective standard.  there's no
way
to moderate based on "does more good than harm" without strong and
formal
and objective definitions of what "good" is and what "harm" is, plus an
appeals process.  trust me: we don't want "strong" "formal" "process".

(my own system, which has produced only two warnings in about 10 years,
is to make the good:harm ratio high enough in any given message that the
"in" jokes are merely a tolerable percentage of the mass of THAT
message;
what i see some other bums doing, though, is pure-"in"-joke messages.)

> I'm certainly hoping that the network operations community will feel
> no need to "talk with their feet" after we all sit down with the Merit
> staff and let our feelings be known, but that is certainly a
possibility.

like the libertarians say, "use your dollar votes!"  i'm comfortable
with
a system whereby susan occasionally turns around in the front seat of ye
olde station wagon and says "you'd better stop that right now, because
if
i have to stop this car and come back there, you'll be sorry" and the
rest
of the time we just keep the fighting down to (bloodless) dull roar.
but
if you have a better system in mind you should propose it; and if you
can't
get traction for it inside nanog, there's always room for another ops
list.

(in Usenet days we used to say "could you move this thread to
$other_group,
where it will be on-topic, and where i'm not a subscriber?" and it
WORKED
a lot of the time, just to wake folks up and show that topic-consensus
was
a property both nec'y and desireable in ALL forums, digital or
otherwise.)