ok listen up (LIST ADMIN)

I have truly HAD ENOUGH. This was brought to a head by the fact that one of the most active list moderators has just resigned, specifically due to the excessive off-topicness (or more precisely, the amount of time necessary to moderate the off-topicness). Here is a snippet of his email to me: "I'm sorry, but I'm horrified by the state of my Inbox. ...snip... but I am no longer prepared to wade through the slew of offtopic sh** in order to forward the good stuff to cctech. I've just totted up over 160 offtopic posts from the past few days, on picking locks, gravity, merits of running your own mail server, mail vs NNTP vs forums, people's ages, and even installing Windows XP, for f***'s sake." We're losing a very dedicated person, for a very bad reason (I'm not saying he isn't justified, I'm saying it sucks to lose someone for this). Ya'll owe him a HUGE amount of thanks, and I daresay an apology. Now, before you go on and on about "some off-topicness" is ok on cctalk, let me explain something. The current setup where the list moderators manually read every post on cctalk and individually route select "on-topic" messages to cctech is made extremely time-consuming when there is a significant amount of off-topicness. I would easily bet that the list moderators spend an hour a day, seven days a week, sifting through all the messages one at a time. This means a few people are paying a very high price so that you can get wildly off-topic. The thing that truly irks me about this is I'm spending a lot of time on list infrastructure and such - trying to get to reworking the faq and cleaning up the archives - and the LAST thing I have time to do right now is start doing most of the moderation. My pinball machine known as "life" is screaming "TILT". I do NOT want to see a huge string of posts to the list with a subject of "Re: ok listen up". This isn't open for public discussion any longer. This list was entrusted to me years ago to take care of and I'll be damned if I'm going to see it degenerate. I love this hobby and this forum way too much for that. My current thought is this: Make cctech the main list. It will be rigorously moderated, anything posted there that isn't strictly on topic will be bounced. cctalk will become the list for discussion of the list itself, and will no longer be a place to post anything technical. It will be unmoderated except for personal flames, politics, etc. You can consider it "the water cooler". While it's primary purpose will be for discussion about list features, etc. you can also just banter with your friends. The key difference is that it won't be for discussion of technical/vintage computer items. People may get trounced on for posting technical discussion to it, instead of to cctech. Then I'll also probably create a classiccmp-announce list, to announce any changes that are implemented based on cctalk discussions. The above isn't a final decision yet. I'm perfectly willing to entertain other ideas - OFF LIST. If you have a concern, want to express some thoughts, just email me directly, I'm very willing to listen. So, you may ask... how is this different from the current setup? On the surface, the only difference is cctalk won't be for any direct computer discussion any longer and posts from cctalk will never make it to cctech. But under the hood... I'll tell you what the difference is - instead of moderators having to wade through the crap to gate stuff to cctech, YOU will have to do YOUR part to make sure you post to the right list with a given post. It's time to shift the workload people. I'll listen to off-list input for a few days, but then I'll act because I don't want this snowballing. Regards (and don't you dare hit reply to the list on this), Jay West