Apologies for the unprofessional word in the subject, but that is a quote from Steve Bannon, who described his recipe for destroying the usefulness of channels of communication. We don’t have the problem (a lot, yet) that people are making up garbage and sending that to our mailing lists. We do have the problem that a lot of people believe they have the right to flood the zone with other s..t. One person sent a message to the list that is unacceptable. The moderators, after some interaction with the poster, acted based on agreed procedure. The action appears a bit on the harsh side to some of us, but it is also mostly harmless (a 14 day break). Kudos to the moderator team for acting to reduce the amount of s..t on the list. I’m admiring your willingness to make decisions that move us forward, even if I don’t always agree. Now what happens? A number of people start abusing the list for a detailed microdiscussion on whether the action was satisfied, and whether the whole idea of moderator actions is destroying western civilization, etc. I probably have deleted most of the messages, but I still have 27 unread ones, and I don’t have time to sift through them for any potential nuggets of reason — the samples I took did not support a hypothesis that this might be useful. Now the zone is really flooded. We can’t use this list for its intended purpose (at least one discussion needed to be diverted to a less appropriate forum already). Worse, the lasting effect is that more people are leaving; the DoS attack against the channel was successful. I don’t understand why people can’t think about the destructive consequences of their actions. The well-known fallacy “I am righteous, so I don’t have to be reasonable” seems to be part of the problem. Reasonable people don’t start endless discussion threads on moderator actions. For the others, I have a request: DO NOT FLOOD THE ZONE WITH SHIT. Thank you. I believe we have to amend the rules for moderator actions, ruling out discussing them on the same list to which the action applies. Grüße, Carsten
