Daniel, perhaps your last words speak to one of the problems with the list. It seems to me that while the club has some 200 members, I seriously doubt that all 200 are hanging on every word being posted to the list. When help is requested to run the telescopes at the SPOC star parties, it seems like you see the same people each time, as few seem willing to step up to the bat. Same with the meetings. Same people _most_ of the time. Same with school star parties. To me, you are saying the list is different from the club & I disagree with that. I stand that the list is the social network of and for the club--but the club is and of astronomical interests, as the posts should rightly be. But, people have a right to go off topic, realizing of course, that they may disturb the universe by so doing. If I listen to you & Rich, even SLAS blasts, such as those about the bbq, would be verbooten. As far as discussions about veterans, I am a Korean era vet, and to mimic Merle, "you're walking on the fighting side of me." Same as Joe--I come here for astronomy interests, too. If I see a thread I don't care for, I just delete it. I counted the emails to this post for Sat, Sun, & Mon. By my count, there were 17 different people doing the posting. The breakdown by person (one was from SLAS) is: one with 10 posts, one w/8, 1w/5, 3 w/4, 2 w/2, 7 w/1. I feel this is pretty typical over a three day period. Not very many people doing the posting, and of those, the bulk of the posts come from a few. We do come here for a common interest. It just comes down to the fact that you can't please all the people all the time. In fact, you cannot please some of the people anytime. I do wish I could say what I want to say in a few words, but that does not ever seem to work out for me. I really do not care if you find this offensive. I have just as much right to say what I feel, as do you. That is the beauty of living in this country we are privileged to call home. 73, lh On 11/14/2011 12:10 PM, daniel turner wrote:
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