<radhika@cyberdiva.org>:
golly - looks like I've missed some real fun stuff (I think I got derailed because of a bouncing account).
and who decides this "broad range" might i ask?
The list manager(s). To whom it is up to try and implement whatever collaborative decision-making processes they feel is appropriate, works well, etc. And at which they can even do a great job. List managing is, as you know, an artful process. Deciding to abdicate all list management responsibility to the listserver software is one kind of decision, in which case list operations very much depend on how the software was designed. Generally I think that list management is a combined human-machine task: some tasks you automate inside the machine (software design), some you maintain a set of human procedures for, some you have human moderators deal with on the fly and invent ad-hoc ways of dealing with. Sometimes on this list we've talked about altering machine procedures, like rejecting all messages in which more than half of lines begin with a caret, implementing kill-files inside digests (well, that was me), etc. Sometimes on this list we've talked about altering human procedures, like drawing up codes of conduct, excluding trolls, etc. Just where on the human-machine spectrum each list's management falls is, clearly, up to the list managers. Learning, teaching, researching about how to improve, fine-tune, recalibrate that process to achieve desired outcomes is surely a kind of Internet research. cheers Bram ps on trolls: Guillaume Latzko-Toth, who I think is still on this list, gave an interesting paper at the Lawrence Kansas AIR which (iirc) talked about the rise of software-agent trolls inside IRC, much more sophisticated than the USENET agent-trolls which I think still roam to and fro. A really neat topic for research: what happens when human and non-human trolls interact, I wonder? Do they? pps: This time I forgot to cut out the quoted digest before sending, ironically. While it may be harder to implement new list management ideas than turn on already-existing ones, some of the already-existing ones seem to work just fine:
Subject: Request to mailing list Air-l rejected From: air-l-admin@aoir.org Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 13:16:01 -0500 (EST)
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