On Jul 11, 2014, at 9:44 AM, geneb <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote: I don't think it is; there are plenty of folks who aren't subscribed due to the volume (even for cctech) who occasionally post with requests for direct replies only. - Dave

On Jul 11, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Zane Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote: On the contrary, I think it's a useful feature. It does, of course, mean the mods have to deal with a boatload of spam (even on cctalk, I assume, because even though it's "unmoderated", I seldom see any spam come through here). Unless more people are going to step up to split the work, I guess that might be the way of the future. - Dave

On Jul 11, 2014, at 11:22 AM, Sean Caron <scaron at umich.edu> wrote: Tell me about it. It took TWO YEARS for a moderator to approve me to join even cctalk. I believe the situation has improved since then (and I am, as always, extremely grateful to Jay West for hosting the list and understand the workload that list moderation entails), but I think it's still useful to be able to pop off a question if you don't want the large amount of traffic this list gets. - Dave

Oh for God's sake... I am so dismayed by the amount of ragging I see on this list... people seem so much less civil than they did 15 years ago. So, Peter, I suppose you are just so brilliant and your timelines are so unconstrained that you can figure out every problem ever laid in front of you without ever having had to ask a more senior colleague, a friend, or even a random person on an Internet list or board for advice? Or maybe your site just shells out the big bucks for 100% commercial software and you can just pick up the phone and dial for help? Maybe you don't even work in IT ops?? Because what you are saying is pretty asinine and reflects a low level of understanding. Generally people who contribute to free software projects are happy to give as freely of their time in supporting the product as they were in making it (so long as the questions aren't completely moronic, and the person doing the asking appears to have done at least some level of due diligence beforehand). That's how it works in free software world. Can't figure it out? Google it. If you can't Google it and have to figure it out yourself, great; do a little write-up afterward. I've taken a lot from the great corpus of knowledge that is the Internet in my 15+ year IT career and I try to give back, too, by writing articles on topics that were hitherto poorly discussed (or not discussed at all) on the Web. http://wildflower.diablonet.net/~scaron/ I've written HOWTOs on a wide range of topics to contribute knowledge back. These pages get on the order of 1500 unique visitors per month, so I gotta be helping someone. Furthermore, I myself get all kinds of random, unsolicited e-mails regarding topics on which I've written with some regularity, and I always take the time out to give a cogent answer or point them to further resources. I've just outright given away scads of interesting stuff to friends and acquaintances when I have plenty. What have _you_ done to give back? In the world most of us know, you often don't have the time to figure the problem out for yourself; you don't have a senior colleague (or anyone at all) that you can lean on for advice & to bounce ideas off of and you don't have the budget to buy the big "point-and-click-sysadmin" appliance boxes where when something goes wrong, all you do is pick up the phone and let the customer engineers sort it out. It's just you, the computer, the software, a big problem and the boss plus hundreds of users bugging you every few hours until it's working again (and heaven forbid if you lot even a byte of data in the process of trying to fix it...). Fortunately, the guys working on most of this software are gracious enough to help out when called upon, displaying the same spirit they did when releasing their software to the world for free in the first place. Sometimes you just don't know enough about the subject matter to be able to contribute back in any meaningful way. People accept that. I can't become a subject matter expert in every single one of the 100+ bits of software I have to support... I ask my questions sparingly and graciously, do my research first, am thankful for any advice I receive, and I try to contribute back in other topics, where I do have deeper insight. Best, Sean On Sat, Jul 12, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:

On Sat, 12 Jul 2014, [UTF-8] St?phane Tsacas wrote: Are you volunteering? Thank you! The original post was from a moderator pleading for meaningful subject lines, not "Check this out", to make it easier to recognize and pass through non-spam posts from non-members in the flood of "Help me" and "Cheap stuff" posts. We all need to TRY. and thank the moderators for their Herculean task. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Sean and Peter, Yes, there WERE flamewars, big ones, 15 years ago. The current configuration was NOT for the purpose of opening the list to drive-by requests of support for current "free" software. It was to pass through stuff like, "My uncle just died. In his closet there's a giant metal lunchbox that says Kaypro, and his basement is full of racks the size of refrigerators with lotsa blinknig lights. Can somebody please haul this junk so the public administrator can sell the house? It's all too old to be worth anything." [speaking of which, . . . who needs a PBM 1000? ]