Re: Don't mean to offend, but...

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 10:54:49PM +0200, taliesin the storyteller wrote:
[snip]
> I used to subscribe to conculture but it was swamped with posts
> from shared worlds, like Ill Bethisad and planet Pii, so I left.
Hmm. You've just convinced me to drop any further consideration of
subscribing to CONCULTURE. Not that I've anything against those particular
concultures; but CONLANG is already very high-traffic as it is, and I'm
currently subscribed to at least two other very high traffic lists, plus a
number of low traffic lists. That all adds up to 800 messages over 24
hours, on bad days. 98% of these go straight into the bit bucket.

> Reading conlang got a lot more effective once I started treating it as a
> newsgroup. I score messages up/down, mark some people and some topics as
> read automagically etc. Get to know your mailer better, there's probably
> lots of ways to personalize it to perform better for you.
[snip]

It *greatly* helps if you have a threaded mailer (i.e., sort messages by
thread, and displays nested thread structure, and has commands to perform
various operations on entire threads---such as delete.) I used to use
PINE, but it does not have threading capabilities (at least back when I
was using it, don't know about now), and after a while it became clear
that it was infeasible in dealing with high-traffic mailing lists. If you
don't already have a thread-enabled mailer, go GET one now!

As for dealing with the volume itself, I usually scan the first few
messages of a thread, and if they are uninteresting to me, I remember the
subject line and just thread-delete everything with that subject line
thereafter. This is where a threaded mailer comes in nicely: you can kill
an entire thread with one command once you've decided you aren't
interested in it. With non-threaded mailers, you need to filter through
every single message and be careful not to accidentally delete interesting
stuff. With threaded mailers, all messages belonging to that thread appear
in one place; it's hard to miss it. Not to mention it's much easier to
follow the conversation if you can see exactly what a message is in reply
to (nested thread structure).


T

--
Almost all proofs have bugs, but almost all theorems are true. -- Paul
Pedersen

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