Re: Oracle Report Generator - SPAMMERS needed

From: Howard J. Rogers <hjr_at_dizwell.com>
Date: Wed, 05 May 2004 08:36:22 +1000
Message-ID: <40981add$0$4548$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au>

Joel Garry wrote:
>>>Well, Jonathan abuses his .sig, but that's ok, since few in the group [snip]

>>
>>Again, you say it's "abuse" of a sig, but you've got to pretty anally 
>>up-tight to read it that way. Which is why, fortunately, most people 
>>don't seem to.

>
>
> Hey, am I not clear enough that it is ok?

Erm, you said it was abuse. But that it was abuse that was somehow OK. I don't see it as abuse at all. That's all. I understand you deem it cool at the end of the day, and I wasn't suggesting you were having a go at Jonathan.

>>>Although I think Daniel's position
>>>is extreme, I think it is both understandable and useful.
>>
>>I think it's the "extremity" I have difficulty with.

>
>
> At one time, I had the same difficulty. Now I think he has good
> spadar (spam radar). Perhaps more of a problem is how he deals with
> it,

The nub of the entire issue, I think.

[snip]

> some groups want to be self-policed.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how one can possibly determine "group thought" in the absence of a group of moderators whose job it is to take feedback etc and determine that. Which means that "self-policing" becomes the imposition of the views of some who aggrandise to themselves the right to determine what the group's attitude is.

Sure, there is a charter. That establishes principles, and that's all well and good. But how that charter is enforced ("policed" if you will) is not a matter for an individual to determine.

[snip]

> For cdo*, I think there are going to be
> people who want to see the group relatively clean,

I'm sure we all do (and I realise the contradiction between that statement and the one about the impossibility of determining the group's attitude!).

It's whether stomping on people with attitude is the right way of achieving that. I don't think it is. In fact, far more words have been expended discussing the thing than if Daniel had just kept quiet in the first place.

Can we agree, perhaps, that "stomping" is counter-productive?

> The idea of self-policing for unmoderated groups is well accepted,
> indeed the purpose of chartering, and sometimes it works and sometimes
> not.

As I say, charters set forth prinicples, which is sound. But the charter doesn't grant anyone the right to aggrandise to themselves the power to interpret those principles in their own particular way on behalf of some nebulous concept of "group attitude", nor to enforce them in their own, er, "unique" style.

 > Overall, it works more than not,

Absolutely agree. Particularly here in .server. And why I therefore cannot understand making such a fuss about the original post.

If I thought Daniel's telling off of the original poster was going to have any effect whatsoever on the chances of subsequent posters with different products making similar sort of posts; or if I though cdo* was in danger of drowning under a flood of commerical spam, my views might be different. But it won't, and we aren't, so they're not. :-)

> I've had a lot of feedback over time where people say "I didn't know
> that, thank you for pointing me to it."

Well, that's rather a different approach to screaming "SPAMMER" at them, altering their company's name to read "SPAM Corporation" and talking to them as if they were idiots or scum. Your approach I could live with.

  >>ISTM that the best filter for these things lies between one's ears, is

>>grey and pink, and slightly squishy. For anything else, there's private 
>>email.

>
>
> That can be turned around to mean a spammer's judgement on whether to
> spam should be the deciding factor as to whether it is ok.

I simply mean that I am capable of deciding for myself whether a post is off-topic, spam, or whatever. I don't need Daniel making that judgement for me, nor anyone else.

> I think you are missing the point of net.wisdom being a
> self-correcting and self-improving mechanism. Feedback is important
> to the mechanism.

I didn't say it wasn't. But that's what email is for. The group doesn't need clogging up with the sort of thing that sparked this entire thread off. Anyone who felt the original post was spam, off-topic or whatever could have emailed the guy.

> How can you have a self-tuning database without it?
> :-) If spammers see other spammers posting without public
> consequences, they think it is ok.

The logical leap to the consequences needing to be "public" is one I can't follow.

A good discussion, however.

Regards
HJR Received on Tue May 04 2004 - 17:36:22 CDT