ok listen up (LIST ADMIN)

[Jay West]

I have truly HAD ENOUGH. This was brought to a head by the fact that one of 
the most active list moderators has just resigned, specifically due to the 
excessive off-topicness (or more precisely, the amount of time necessary to 
moderate the off-topicness). Here is a snippet of his email to me:

"I'm sorry, but I'm horrified by the state of my Inbox. ...snip... but I am
no longer prepared to wade through the slew of offtopic sh** in order to
forward the good stuff to cctech. I've just totted up over 160 offtopic
posts from the past few days, on picking locks, gravity, merits of
running your own mail server, mail vs NNTP vs forums, people's ages, and
even installing Windows XP, for f***'s sake."

We're losing a very dedicated person, for a very bad reason (I'm not saying 
he isn't justified, I'm saying it sucks to lose someone for this). Ya'll owe 
him a HUGE amount of thanks, and I daresay an apology.

Now, before you go on and on about "some off-topicness" is ok on cctalk, let 
me explain something. The current setup where the list moderators manually 
read every post on cctalk and individually route select "on-topic" messages 
to cctech is made extremely time-consuming when there is a significant 
amount of off-topicness. I would easily bet that the list moderators spend 
an hour a day, seven days a week, sifting through all the messages one at a 
time. This means a few people are paying a very high price so that you can 
get wildly off-topic.

The thing that truly irks me about this is I'm spending a lot of time on 
list infrastructure and such - trying to get to reworking the faq and 
cleaning up the archives - and the LAST thing I have time to do right now is 
start doing most of the moderation. My pinball machine known as "life" is 
screaming "TILT".

I do NOT want to see a huge string of posts to the list with a subject of 
"Re: ok listen up". This isn't open for public discussion any longer. This 
list was entrusted to me years ago to take care of and I'll be damned if I'm 
going to see it degenerate. I love this hobby and this forum way too much 
for that.

My current thought is this: Make cctech the main list. It will be rigorously 
moderated, anything posted there that isn't strictly on topic will be 
bounced. cctalk will become the list for discussion of the list itself, and 
will no longer be a place to post anything technical. It will be unmoderated 
except for personal flames, politics, etc. You can consider it "the water 
cooler". While it's primary purpose will be for discussion about list 
features, etc. you can also just banter with your friends. The key 
difference is that it won't be for discussion of technical/vintage computer 
items. People may get trounced on for posting technical discussion to it, 
instead of to cctech. Then I'll also probably create a classiccmp-announce 
list, to announce any changes that are implemented based on cctalk 
discussions.

The above isn't a final decision yet. I'm perfectly willing to entertain 
other ideas - OFF LIST. If you have a concern, want to express some 
thoughts, just email me directly, I'm very willing to listen.

So, you may ask... how is this different from the current setup? On the 
surface, the only difference is cctalk won't be for any direct computer 
discussion any longer and posts from cctalk will never make it to cctech. 
But under the hood...  I'll tell you what the difference is - instead of 
moderators having to wade through the crap to gate stuff to cctech, YOU will 
have to do YOUR part to make sure you post to the right list with a given 
post. It's time to shift the workload people. I'll listen to off-list input 
for a few days, but then I'll act because I don't want this snowballing.

Regards (and don't you dare hit reply to the list on this),

Jay West