On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 05:08:38PM -0500, Mark A Mandel <mam at theworld.com> wrote: > On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Scott Ingram wrote: > #Actually, if anyone wants to move the religion discussion to a newsserver, I > #have no problem with that ;) > AMEN! I sense a degree of hostility emenating from the list, Captain... Precedent suggests that on discussion lists about an author, on which the author participates, there are at least three major kinds of people. 1) People who only want to hear about the books. 2) People who only want announcements about the books. 3) People who are willing to engage in extensive chitchat about just about anything. When the 3rd group is large, you have an off-topic problem which annoys people in the 1st and 2nd groups. When the 3rd group includes the author himself, you can't really use the off-topic stick effectively to reduce discussion -- since the author, almost by definition, is on-topic. We already have a readalong and rpg sublist; might it be time for a "forum" list for mostly-to-completely off-topic threads, so they don't bother the people who are only here for the books? -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp