[TYPES] stricter moderation...?

[Geoffrey Alan Washburn]

Benjamin Pierce wrote:
> I am also very much in favor of a slightly stricter moderation  
> policy, though I'm aware that it may be difficult to find a policy  
> that is both desirable and implementable with a reasonable amount of  
> Stephanie's energy.  I liked the old policy that Phil describes, but  
> I think it got left by the wayside when we transitioned to the  
> Mailman software from the older ad hoc system: AFAIK, Mailman doesn't  
> provide an easy way for the moderator to send a message back to a  
> poster saying "I'm rejecting your post but I'd be happy to accept one  
> with a preamble explaining its relevance to the list."
    "Use the source Luke" :-)   http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/

> One piece of anecdotal evidence that more moderation would be better  
> (for me) is that I discovered a few months ago that, when messages  
> arrives via Types, my instinctive reaction was annoyance rather than  
> interest ("Oh, here's more spam...").  Since then I've been sending  
> Types stuff to a separate mailbox that I look at only rarely.  This  
> seems a shame.

    I would have to agree a great majority of the mail I get from TYPES 
these days is filed without being read.  I just did a quick analysis of 
approximately the last month's messages (before this thread started) and 
found that there were 38 messages total.  Nine of the messages were not 
announcements -- all discussion on the semantics of intersection types. 
Of the remaining 29 messages, which were various sorts of announcements, 
9 mentioned the word "type" in a way other than the header mailman adds 
to messages.  The remaining 20 messages did not mention the word "type", 
though a few did mention other keywords that might have made them 
eligible in a more comprehensive study.


> Cutting down on the number of random announcements might also help  
> people feel encouraged to post questions and start discussions (to  
> keep the volume from going too low :-).

    Indeed.  I would agree with Eijiro that the signal is too low at the 
moment.

-- 
[Geoff Washburn|geoffw at cis.upenn.edu|http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~geoffw/]