On Sat, Mar 22, 2003 at 04:10:34PM -0800, lazarus <lazarus33pjf at cox.net> wrote: > On Sat, 22 Mar 2003 17:44:22 -0600, you wrote: > >The initial quoted comment ("I was told the Hungarians > >invented...") didn't seem to be referring to Gore at all, but > >rather Brust. > >The response ("... stop listning to Al Gore") was IMHO a > >misreading of the original comment and an inappropriate > >politicization. > >The response to that ("I know it's off topic, but...") was > >similarly inappropriate for the political content, and more > >annoying to me personally (because it contains some things that > >I would dispute and don't like to leave unchallenged). > >But I will resist. > On usenet, the standard practise is to put an OT: in the subject. > Would that not be a good thing to start here, so that people could > filter on OT: and avoid threads that are possibly controversial? "Standard practice" on Usenet is a misnomer for anything not in an RFC, generally. That said, I am not at all opposed to this practice. The dynamics on a mailing list are different -- mainly in that you have to download the message before you can filter it out on the subject line, and off-topic messages still sit in mailboxes until deleted, taking up quota space and so on. As a result, it's not necessarily ideal. -- 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