This is a public-interest archive. Personal data is pseudonymized and retained under GDPR Article 89.

wooden compost bins and off-topic postings

Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html

On wooden compost bins: the idea of using poison-soaked wood to produce
compost to feed myself scares me a bit.  Non-poison-soaked wood in this
situation will just rot.

On off-topic posts

I'm really sad to see Patricia and Smitty go.

There are degrees of off-topic-ness.  At some level of off-topic-ness,
any public list becomes essentially useless.  There's a continuum of
usefulness here; as the list consists more and more of posts that are
more and more off-topic, it becomes less and less useful.

Posts about what is off-topic are pretty far off-topic on every mailing
list or newsgroup, excepting only news.admin.net-abuse.email and
similar places.  Posts about what is off-topic, therefore, tend to make
lists more useless except when the state of the list is already very
bad.

Lists can be pretty liberal about what is considered "on-topic" and
still be pretty useful.  IMHO, the only really off-topic posts I've
seen here lately were my post about kinds of electrical lighting and
the thread about off-topic posts.

So here are my recommendations:
- try not to post about off-topic things;
- try not to respond to off-topic posts;
- if someone is really egregiously off-topic (for example, posting
  entirely about breeding cats, Days Of Our Lives, film criticism, 
  Xlib programming, gasoline boycotts, little boys with cancer who want
  you to send them postcards, or MAKE MONEY FAST!!!), try sending them
  private email before posting off-topic email accusing them of being
  off-topic.

So I don't completely agree with the "just press Delete" crowd, but I
don't think we should be posting about what is and isn't on-topic all
the time either.

This is only based on my experience of perhaps two hundred mailing
lists and a hundred newsgroups over the last eight years, so it is
certainly not the final word on the matter --- just my opinion based on
my limited experience.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08.  Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>
The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either.  :)


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, write to sqft-unsubscribe@listbot.com
______________________________________________________________________
Start Your Own FREE Email List at http://www.listbot.com
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index