On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, The White Crow wrote: > While the gmast has its share of tempers, it is much less problematic than > many lists I've been on. I was on a list for a game system that was hosted > at a university. The list was low traffic, but had a long and loyal > following. The list had not had a moderator for something like five years, > nor anyone responsible for it. It had problems, where people would get > unsubbed at random. It had problems where people couldn't, no matter what, > get unsubbed. Every time there was a problem, people panickly begged the > person who'd been on the wrong end of the snafu to not report it to the > university sysadmin, in fear that if they discovered the list lying around > with no one to claim it, it would be deleted. There was occasionally talk > of starting a new list elsewhere, but nothing was agreed upon. > > Then, one time it happened again. Someone bopped over to egroups and set > up another list, and came back and said "look what I did! now we won't have > to worry." The outrage was unbelievable. They didn't want a list with ads > at the bottom. They didn't want someone to have taken charge without > permission like that. They didn't want to deal with some unknown > company. Throughout this argument, the list had its normal shares of > problems, becoming even more flaky. > > The result? We ended up with two lists, the original and hte new. Half > the folks were subscribed to both, another quarter to one or the other. So > now, instead of wondering if the lull in messages would be that you'd been > unsubbed or just a lull (which always led to: "am I subbed?" questions and > the invariable "yes, you are" responses), you also got dupes of most of the > posts...and most of the conversations, being cross-posted, got fractured > more quickly than otherwise would have been. In disgust, I finally quit both. [Reminder of message snipped as not relevant to my reply] Oh, I didn't realize you were on Falkenstein too. :-) Yeah, the problem of the absent moderator is a definite issue. Certainly when GMAST was hosted on the college server, the list-owner was *very* absent and this *did* cause problems when the list was to be shut down. But we survived that one, the Stargame time and we'll survive this too. -- Michael Feldhusen mike_f@io.com http://www.io.com/~mike_f/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- GMAST Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gmast/
