On 1 Apr 98 at 23:49, R. Lee Hawkins wrote:
> >PvT's usage of " ! " marks may not be proper application of punctuation in
> >the English language, but he is free to do so - it is *his* style. His
> >responses of "I have one of these available for $x.xx" may not have
>
> No, it doesn't, and is blatantly commercial, which, since this list is
> hosted by an educational institution, is not a good idea. If the list
> becomes predominantly commercial in nature (meaning lots of vendors
> follow Paul's lead and flood the list with "Hey I've got that
> postings"), then Shawn might well decide that the *educational* purpose
> of the list is gone, and drop it.
<snip>
>
> This is a free country, but even in a free country, we are allowed to
> have standards if we as a group here wish to. This list is intended to
> be educational, not commercial. Paul has crossed that line, and we need
> to make a decision as a group (Shawn, wanna give us an opinion on this?)
> as to whether this thing should be allowed. Why? Because if we let
> Paul do it, we have to let *every* vendor do it, and then the list will
> quickly just become an advertisement list. And if that happens, I'm
> history.
>
I have refrained from commenting so far, mainly because I have been too busy to
even read most of the posts. However, since Lee has directed this one to me, I
will make a few observations and recommendations:
I would agree that Paul's post have decidedly lower education vs. commercial
content ratio than most on the list.
So far, I have let this slide, as the list collectively asked Paul to
refrain, and he promised to do so, by keeping pointed commercial replies
private, as they should be.
But these commercial replies were starting creep back on the list which I had
hoped was just a case of Paul replying to the list in error. His recent
rebuttals and comments on the multitude of postings suggest that it was not an
error.
Even assuming Paul slipped up in forgetting his promise, his rash of replies
was totally unacceptable, as they had zero Oly content (and not even any
commercial content).
Not so fast, though. Those of you who flooded the list with this off topic
discussion are also to blame for perpetuating these zero content messages.
So in future, if anyone has a continued problem of this nature, please direct
your messages either to myself, or in private to the person with which the
problem exists. By "continued" problem, I mean cases in which a listmember has
already been made aware of their inappropriate posts, but chooses to continue.
Obviously I can't deal with every off topic beef that comes up.
So that's it. Paul, you are welcome on this list provided you can minimize
direct commercial notes, and offer some educational advice.
ps: And to those who suggest just filtering the posts you don't like - that
only works on usenet where you can choose what to download. Most listmembers
are forced to download all of it, *then* filter. And I remind you that Zuiko
has delivered >800,000 messages since Nov 20, 97, which amounts to just under 4
Gb of data, most of which is from this list. How'd you like to have *that* on
your monthly ISP bill? ;-)
Statistics from Thu Nov 20 14:30:42 1997
M msgsfr bytes_from msgsto bytes_to Mailer
0 0 0K 16279 44348K prog
5 23243 333667K 844917 3673886K esmtp
8 18325 151628K 270 788K local
========================================
T 41568 485295K 861466 3719022K
========================
Shawn Wright
Computer Systems Manager
Shawnigan Lake School
250-743-6240
swright@xxxxxxxxx
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