On Sat, 22 Mar 2003 17:57:23 -0600, you wrote: >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. > True. I guess I should have said standard netiquette, which is often ignored. :-) >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. Ah, I hadn't thought of that. My newsreader, Agent, can be set up to automatically delete based on filters like that, but I understand there are many ways of reading the list, including digest form, which can't be filtered at all. -- lazarus "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American Public." -- Theodore Roosevelt