Excellent point made. I'm sorry to hear that David Rankin actually left. Perhaps another point to be made is this is really not a bunch of "guys" (or gals) sitting around a table talking. At the table you can see the nuances of facial expression and body position. You can't always tell, in an online board, if someone is making a teasing comment or a joke. People (and that includes me) can get ruffled awfully fast. Any comment made on a board like this one can be misinterpreted quickly and postings can deteriorate in seconds. As you said, this is a board of 200 not 20. Let's just keep all this in mind. ----- Original Message ----- From: "daniel turner" <outwest112@yahoo.com> To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Monday, November 14, 2011 12:10:32 PM Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Discussions The relevence of content is always relevent. I have belonged to many email discussion groups and I have to say that this one suffers from buddy chatter. Long ago email was the only online medium and discussion lists were more informal. Today there are other outlets for people who just want to chat with friends. This is not a group of a dozen people who all know eachother by first names. It's a list of over 200 people who come here to discuss.... well ... astronomy in Utah. I dislike it when people are invited to leave the list if they don't like the content. We recently lost David Rankin and at the time I wish I had said something. You are not addressing your buddies, you are talking to 200 people, most of whom don't know you and really don't care about your personal problems or random opinion. DT ________________________________ From: Rich Allen <rico@ricosweb.net> To: Utah Astronomy <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Monday, November 14, 2011 11:31 AM Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Discussions On 11/14/2011 11:23 AM, Joe Bauman wrote:
I think of UA as a group of friends who are interested in astronomy, sitting around a table and talking. Nobody should try to restrict their conversation to one topic.
That's not how special interest mailing lists work. Each list is about a specific topic, it is not a general forum to discuss anything you want. If you guys want to rename this list to "Utah Chat" then I'll go find somewhere else to discuss astronomy. Rich Allen _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php