[volunteers] How the 'major eruptions of offtopic spew' clause works (was: There, fixed that)

[Rick Moen]

Michael, just to reassure you, in no way are you in any form of trouble with
SVLUG.  (Also, if you were hearing from any listadmin, it would be a
communication that says it's from a listadmin.)

Something you wrote earlier caught my eye.

> I recommend Rick that you stop allowing politics on the list period that
> are neither friendly nor polite.

There are a couple of severe and fundamental misconceptions, here.

One is that the listadmins are in the business of 'allowing' things.  We
aren't.  Our role is the opposite.  Everything is allowed by automatic
operation of the software.  The listadmins intervene to deal with violations
of the rules.

The other, worse misconception is that the listadmins have the latitude to 
just unilaterally decide to _enact_ a new rule, e.g., just because some guy
in Oregon wrote to one of us and said 'I recommend that you do [foo].'

It doesn't work that way, nor would we want it to.  We have an extremely
short and simple set of written, publicly posted rules for our several
mailing lists.  Those rules are posted on the Web page _of_ those mailing
lists and on one page linked directly from there -- such that you pretty
much cannot miss seeing them when you sign up.

The listadmins enforce those rules.  They absolutely do not enforce any rules
that aren't there.

You would have known about our extremely simple, minimal, impartial,
publicly applied and documented enforcement regime if you had paid
attention.  If you _had_ paid attention, you would have seen that nothing
whatsoever in the wording of any of our rules bans, encourages, alllows, or
otherwise regulates discussion of politics, as such.  You would have also
seen that nothing in our rules bans, encourages, alllows, or otherwise
regulates friendliness, courtesy, or lack thereof.

There is a very simple and short set of rules.  One of them is the one where
you are advised that the listadmins normally intervene only for technical
reasons, to avert spam, or to halt major eruptions of offtopcic spew.  The
latter clause is what I applied to terminate Mr. Bilk's long screeds about
political conspiracy, which as listadmin I had decided had reached a level
of noise and disruption where it was impairing the mailing list as a whole.
I put my foot down and, speaking in listadmin capacity, said it was no more
acceptable than when he tried to pull the same bullshit in 2008, that it 
had to stop immediately, and that this was his second warning (first having
been during the 2008 spewing bout).

Mr. Bilk complied with my requirement that he cease that activity, so no
further action was needed in his case.  His remaining, ongoing noisemaking
was the bit where he kept calling me names and attempting the misrepresent
the enforcement that had just occurred.  Neither of _those_ bits of
noisemaking vioated any rule.  Therefore, no listadmin intervention was
appropriate, therefore none occurred.  (I actually advised Mr. Bilk that he
was specifically invited to keep on calling me names, as I thought it was
kind of cute and reminded me of kooks on Usenet.)

Note:  Mr. Bilk is NOT required to refrain from addressing politics, nor is
anyone else.  I merely required (in my listadmin capcity) that the
particular bout of major offtopic spew he was then carrying on, come to an
end.

SVLUG does not have an absolute requirement that postings to the
svlug at lists.svlug.org list be topical.  It violatels no rule when people
digress within reason.  The listadmins intervene when/if the volume or
intensity of digression becomes excessive in proportion to the mailing list
as a whole.


When you jumped in under the mistaken impression that you would be helping,
and attempted to debate Mr. Bilk on politics, and then where you did the
extemely worse thing where you made mental health allegations, this
immediately raised a very dramatic and _new_ 'major eruptions of offtopcic
spew' problem, which I addressed by restricting you posting ability for
several days.

I am writing so that you and the other volunteers are clear on what happened
and why.

Thank you for your concern about SVLUG's mailing list adminstration.  As a
user group with a 26 year history, and the longest record of Internet forum
operation of any Linux user group on the planet, we actually have put a
great deal of thought into the subject, which is specifically why we are
disinclined to casually change our carefully worked out rules just because
some new guy from Oregon, who can't be bothered to read our Web pages on the
subject, suddenly had an idea.

On a personal note, next time, consider shutting up and listening.  You kind
of epically failed at that bit, and it would have saved you a lot of time
and some amount of trouble.