[kwlug-disc] trimming posts

[Paul Nijjar]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 11:56:35PM -0400, Steve Izma wrote:
> 
> The digest format magnifies the problem, especially when people
> include all of the digest in their replies. That's sheer
> laziness. But it's also laziness to include parts of the message
> you have no intention of referring to.
>  
> > Paul's 40k limit for the purposes of keeping posts small is specious
> > - I can't recall the last time I saw a post get anywhere near it. It
> > does, however, keep most attachments away, for which I am very
> > grateful.
> 
> The point of his post was not the 40k but the criticism that
> people are not trimming their posts.
> 

Yes. To clarify: I was not trying to re-ignite the top-posting vs
bottom-posting flamewar. 

I made the comment because about five posts got caught in the
moderation filter for being over 40k. The reason these posts were over
40k was because they were participants in rather active comment
threads (which is awesome!) but people were not trimming their posts,
so the emails got large. 

Sometimes when posts get caught in moderation I let them through. Once
in a while I will even let an attachment through, but this is pretty
arbitrary.

I am just making a comment that I personally do not feel it is
worthwhile to let 40k emails through just because we are not trimming
our posts. So if your message gets rejected and you want it to get
through, then please trim the message appropriately and resend. 

I am not the only person with moderation powers on the list (and I am
happy to grow the set of moderators, provided they don't mind being
deluged with "kwlug-disc-owner" spam), so if other people want to put
in the effort of letting these messages through then I won't complain.
At the present time it appears that I do much of the moderation,
however.  Note that I am not on email as much as you might think, so I
tend not to go through the moderation lists right away. That cuts off
the flow of conversation.

My own personal feeling is that although small and arbitrary, 40k is a
reasonable limit for a text-heavy discussion list. We might also be
able to eliminate this limit entirely, but I am not sure that it buys
us a lot of signal. 

- Paul 

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org