(no subject)

[elizabear]

I have heard many stories of people who leave the sca-east list or never want to join because of flame wars or rudeness or personality clashes. I find this really sad. I created the list all those years ago to be a way to connect people in the kingdom, to help share information relating to our hobby, to be a useful and interesting place to be. Sometimes the list does those things in a positive way and sometimes in a negative way. I propose to you: what can be done to make this list a more positive place to be, a more welcoming place, a place with less conflict and less clashing?

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

On one hand, email lists get like that. On the other hand, I hear it can get pretty bad. I left it a year or two ago.

One thing which might help, without censoring, is to put some limit on how many posts a person can make in a day. That would slow down the heated response reaction significantly. Say, 2 or 3 per 24 hours. I don't know if the software can do that, of course.

[siderea]

I don't know if the software can do that, of course.

Uh, actually, I was thinking (years ago) about writing a program to implement just that (well, a procmail filter and/or perl program). I don't think it would be that hard; I could investigate this, if useful. elizabear, you know where I am if this is something you want to look into.

[siderea]

(BTW, I should mention: There are social issues with doing that. Everything is tradeoffs.)

(Other things it's occurred to me would be useful to implement:

* Slashdot-esque karma system for email lists; karma-based throttling.
* Moderator thread-freezing.
* Thread-shape throttling -- vastly harder than the others to implement.

I, uh, have a thing for the anthro-hacking which fun email/forum affordance-tweaking amounts to. It's a sideline of the psych/anthro thing. :D )