Re: Interested in a moderated theory forum?

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:<vKWOb.100681$I06.447767_at_attbi_s01>...
> "Paul G. Brown" <paul_geoffrey_brown_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:57da7b56.0401190941.dec26a8_at_posting.google.com...
> >
> > My experience with moderated groups is limited to political e-mail
> > lists.
>
> Okay. Have you ever been involved in a technical moderated list?

    I have posted and lurked on moderated lists technical lists run by    a company for talking about a specific product. It was pretty dry stuff.

> I have. My experience is nothing like yours. I expect this is
> because technical speech is very different from political speech.

   Really? ;-)

   I'll play the "human nature" card. The lesson I drew was to be   skeptical of the idea that the kind of benevolant despot a moderator   needs to be works, in general. There are exceptions, but they're rare.

> Your experience, while interesting, is not relevant to how a
> moderated technical forum would work.

    "Interesting" is a pretty dry word for the experience.

    I'm going to bet that the success of a moderated forum is largely    a consequence of how precisely it defines its charter. Forums with a    mandate to discuss a programming language (like SQL or C++) would    probably work better (generate more light than heat) than a forum    for discussions of as broad a field as 'database theory'.

> > My guess is that a moderated version of c.d.t would degenerate into
> > a Third Manifesto discussion group.
>
> Uh, that's pretty much what c.d.t. is right now anyway.

    Oh I don't know. Sure, the longer threads tend that way. But over the   last week there's been a pretty wide range of topics.

    Look, if folk want to create a moderated forum to discuss database theory   no one is going to stand in their way. I'm just saying that moderation (in   the e-list context) brings its own problems; you lose your more colorful   characters, and legitimate challenges to orthodoxy can be marginalized.

    KR

          Pb Received on Tue Jan 20 2004 - 04:01:25 CET