Re: My current practise in using Conlang e-mails

Hallo!

On Fri, 2 Jan 2004 16:16:42 -0800,
Clint Jackson BAKER <litrex2@...> wrote:

> Dear all--
> I just deleted a zillion conlang e-mails.  Originally I had tried to
> delete occasionally with the hope of getting to the ones I thought
> useful.  But this hopelessly backfired when I saw that my account was
> at 125% of its limit.
The only way of dealing with the volume (short of leaving the list)
is going NOMAIL.  I have gone NOMAIL years ago, reading the messages
from the archive and using copy-and-paste to reply, because I was fed up
with throwing dozens of uninteresting messages out of my mailbox
every day, and I am not going to change that setting unless
the list volume dips substantially.

> In the year-plus that I was away, both the population and traffic of
> this list exploded.  I cannot come anywhere near reading all of the
> e-mails.  There are not enough hours in the day.
Yes.

>       Additionally, I have
> calculated from my deleting in the recent past that about 95% of the
> e-mails are irrelevant to what I hope to accomplish.  That does not
> mean that these e-mails are without value--please do keep
> posting!--but it means that there is very little that I can read that
> meets my particular needs as a conlanger.
My impression is that about 80 to 90% of the messages posted on CONLANG
have nothing to with conlangs at all!  Most of the stuff posted on
the list is about English pronunciation, TV series, kitchen recipes
and whatever, and shouldn't have been posted on CONLANG in the
first place.  The number of messages per day that interest
me (which is a smaller number than the number of on-topic messages)
is sometimes less than 1.  There are days when the number of on-topic
messages is zero, and yet the list is held because the number of
messages posted that day exceeds 100.

> So, I have to tell you all this:
> If I see the same subject title over and over and over, those will be
> deleted, because I know that the subject has drifted considerably, but
> there is no way to tell what the current subject is from the outdated
> subject title.
That's all because no-one seems to get what subject lines are for,
and that they can be changed (or do people here use dead-ass e-mail
programs that don't implement that feature?).  You can always use
the "was:" convention to keep a reference to the old subject.

> Chit-chatty messages will more than likely be deleted, unless they are
> someone's initial introduction, or it is directed to me.  Sorry--I
> simply have far too much going on.
I usually don't read CHAT: or OT: messages at all.  Problem is that
most messages are off-topic chat and *not* tagged that way.
And if all those off-topic messages weren't posted on CONLANG at all,
the traffic would be easily manageable and no-one would be forced
to go NOMAIL, and the list would not be held due to traffic overload
every now and then.

> I will delete others at my discretion.
>
> I'm sorry--it's just that the conlang list has become enormous--which
> is in itself a good thing.  But it has become too unmanageable to me.
>
> I tried to express all of this in a gentle manner, and I think I
> failed.
Urgent matters are in need of clear words.  You have put it more
politely than I would have done.

>       I hope I have not hurt anyone in the process.  (You know I
> will want to keep hearing personally from some of you, too.)  But I
> have had to do something to make this manageable for myself, and
> unfortunately, I have had to be drastic about it.
>
> Thanks for understanding.
> Clint
I whole-heartedly agree with you.  The excessive list volume is
a serious problem that can only be fixed by drastically reducing
the off-topic traffic on the list.  Chat messages are no proper
use, they are denial-of-service attacks, to overstate it a bit.
I tend to think that notorious off-topic posters ought to be
banned from CONLANG.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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