From: Dylan Northrup Date: 2010-04-15T19:58:38+09:00 Subject: Re: Who maintains ruby-talk? A long time ago, (15.04.10), in a galaxy far, far away, Justin Collins wrote: :=As for your moderation concerns, I do not share them, nor do I really :=understand your vehemence (my perception!) on the issue. Trolls should not be :=fed, spammers should be blocked. In the absence of moderation or some central authority, spammers cannot be blocked. Or, more properly, it's up to each individual subscriber to block a spammer at the point of receipt. :=Threads I don't care about are not read. I am :=with Robert in saying we should be a community that gets along without the :=need of supervisors. If there is one rule in our anarchist mailing :=list/forum/newsgroup, it is "Matz is nice so we are nice." That is enough of a :=moderator for me. This is a fine philosophy until someone is not nice. Recently someone, namely thunk, has been "not nice". If more people are "not nice" ruby-talk goes from being a valuable community resource to "that place where there's too much noise and not enough signal." I do not share the same strident opposition to central authority that others on this list seem to feel. I've been a list owner, a list moderator and a member of lists where I've been moderated. As said previously, having someone with the ability to say "Dude, stop being a wanker" and having the ability to back that up is nothing new on the Internet. Hell, moderated e-mail lists were nothing new 20 years ago when I got my first e-mail account. If you believe having a moderator (or group of moderators) will make the list a tool of control by the dictator(s) at the top, your belief goes against the vast majority of historical examples of moderated e-mail lists. The more important question would be whether you could find enough candidates a) trusted by the majority of the community who b) would be willing to spend the extra time and deal with the hassle that is being a list moderator. Libertarian ideas of freedom from tyranny might be academic concerns if only because nobody would want to moderate the list in the first place. -- Dylan Northrup - docx@io.com - http://www.io.com/~docx/ "Adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet." - Aimee Mullins