Sigh. Speaking for myself only. I wish it wasn't raining here so I could go out to see the Cherry Blossoms instead of spending my night at a computer. Anyway. --- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, ater31337 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > I'm going to have to back up Weiner here on both counts: > > 1. Having read the post on the HSQB site linked earlier in this > discussion, and experimented myself by trying to join this group with > a dummy account, I have to say that the whole process of requiring > specific moderator approval for joining is pretty stupid. First off, > there's nowhere that makes it patently obvious that a user needs to > take direct action in communicating with a moderator to actually have > any attention paid to his efforts to join; second, it's impossible to > get a list of the moderators and their contact information without > actually being a member... I think we can all see the irony there. > 1a. Moderators started checking requests to join because of spammers, who threatened to make this club very unusable. 1b. IMPORTANT - You don't email a moderator - you click on "Join This Group" and click join after choosing your preferences. The moderators act on these requests. No emailing moderators is necessary. This seems self-explanatory. 1c. There's a very real value in having at least some presence on Yahoo - it remains considered the main home of groups for all types of interest by default. > 2. I don't think Weiner is doing this out of personal animosity; it's > just that there is only one person who does repeatedly post in batches > of 4-5 at a time, and yes it is rather irritating and monopolizes > attention away from other recent posts, and it would be that way > regardless of the author. In this particular case, I think it would > be wise if UTC got some free webspace and used that to post all their > announcements and results, and just made a post linking to all of them > every time something came up. This would also defeat the problem of > all the tedious searching it takes to find results from the > 39217239879898732 old UTC tournaments since their results are not > posted on any permanent website. There really isn't a mailbox quantity question - if you split a 10K post into a 2K post, a 3K post, and a 5K post, mailboxes aren't overwhelemed. There's also a value in three to-the-point emails, rather than one broad one that covers a variety of topics (particularly a specific one that a reader might miss or ignore). Note also that not every school has someone who feels comfortable with creating a web page and that web pages are, by their nature, opt-in - you directly have to decide that you're interested in UTC's happenings to find things only on their webpage. Any discussion group is more of a cornucopia. > > I think that is also a statement as to how outdated the Yahoo group > format is and how silly it is to have thousands of posts clumped > together without any threading or topic sorting to differentiate > anything. Unfortunately, it seems like most of the circuit is still > locked into this format, but hey, if the moderation keeps up its > wonderful idea of blocking new members by making it ridiculously > tedious to get access to the group, maybe the circuit activity will go > elsewhere anyway. Personal preference. I tend not to prefer threading, since I find it unnecessarily rigid. Your choice. Let a thousand ways to get your message across bloom, or something like that. Hayden (who can stand a format flame war, and a message service flame war, but will delete posts like crazy if people start fighting over whether dogs or cats are better)
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