ADMIN: Per-user posting limit imposed

As your list owner, I have decided to go ahead and impose a per-user,
per-day posting limit in addition to the existing per-day limit of 99
messages.  Anyone who posts more than N messages to the list will have
all excess messages returned as bounce-o-grams.  This will not cause the
list to be held.  Offending messages will *not* be automatically posted,
but the malefactor is free to repost them the next day.

As a social experiment, I am not revealing the value of N at this time.
I want to see how much people's behavior is actually affected by the
limit.  Of course, any of you can find out what it is by sending enough
posts "just as a test".  Please don't do that.

In order to decide a reasonable value of N, I did a little retrospective
study, using the last 25 weeks of weekly per-user posting data.  (I could
have gotten daily data with more pain, but decided not to bother.)
A total of 214 people posted at least once during that period.

Of those, just 11 (including myself) posted more than 7 * N messages
in any one week.  (If anyone other than myself posted from more than
one address, they may have been left out of the 11, but I doubt it.)
Though the Dirty-Dozen-Minus-One are responsible for about 37% of all list
traffic, they also include some of the most widely respected list members.

It turns out that the list owner is exempt from the per-day posting limit.
I will make my best effort to observe it voluntarily.  Of course, admin
messages like this one do not count.

We've been doing well for the last couple of days.  Hopefully we'll
continue to do so without too much more pain.

John Cowan, Lord of the Instrumentality of Conlang

--
Knowledge studies others / Wisdom is self-known;      John Cowan
Muscle masters brothers / Self-mastery is bone;       jcowan@reutershealth.com
Content need never borrow / Ambition wanders blind;   www.ccil.org/~cowan
Vitality cleaves to the marrow / Leaving death behind.    --Tao 33 (Bynner)

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