Re: A proposal to bring together the conlang communities

On Sun, 27 Jan 2008 12:31:43 +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>On Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:59:50 -0500, Amanda Babcock Furrow wrote:
>
>> Oh, geez, is that what's happening?  Because the ZBB makes me sad - it
>> has such a different flavor to it!  No real names, no collegial
>> atmosphere, no sense of how old people are (except, I think, younger
>> on average).  Less feeling of internationality.
>
>I agree.  The ZBB community is much less mature than the CONLANG
>community; most ZBB members' projects are naive and unsophisticated
>(there's nothing wrong with that - we all started that way - but
>it is not what I wish to discuss), and rude behaviour has been
>unbearably frequent over there.  Indeed, I don't really feel much
>like sharing the results of my conlanging with those people.
>The CONLANG mailing list is a much more grateful and mature forum.
That's more or less just Eternal September finally catching up on
conlanging. If you think ZBB is bad in that respect, you haven't seen the
conlang sections of some more generic linguistic forums!

…During the 15 years I've hanged on various forums and mailing lists, I've
noticed mailing lists having a tendency to attract the kind of people who
want a "cozy nook"; and when newbies start pouring in at too large a rate,
they retreat into the background, perhaps but not necessarily to re-emerge
when things calm again. Forum oldbies, on the other hand, seem to generally
not really mind. And this is just one difference in the list; far as I can
tell, "mailing list culture" and "forum culture" are quite distinct,
probably "usenet culture" and "blog culture" too. So I don't think this is
as simple an issue as content filtering!

However, an unified conland wiki sounds like a good idea — but that would be
a question to discuss with the respectiv admins, not us layfolk. Unless all
join in on the project, creating a new wiki would just fragment the field
further!

John Vertical

Replies