Every once in a while the list ruffles its feathers,
so I thought I'd restate some of the basic Vocalist
guidelines that we all put together when we
reassembled here:
1. No personal attacks. Don't get snippy. Don't talk
about politics. There is a lovely list called
VOCALIST-BACKSTAGE where you can take your heated
non-singing discussions and your feelings about the
world at large and the idiotic poster next door in
particular. To subscribe, send a blank email to:
vocalist-backstage-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
If you want to remove a discussion to BACKSTAGE,
simply send a quick message to the vocalist that says,
"XXX, I have responded to your latest message on the
BACKSTAGE list since it is now off-topic." The
interested masses should follow.
Marko (on the old Vocalist) used to manually boot all
off-topic message to the BACKSTAGE list. I can do
that if you want, but I think the strategy above
should work without that being necessary.
2. Sending six or seven different messages in the
space of a couple of hours is a silly waste of
bandwidth, especially since the majority of
Vocalisters receive the digest version of the list, so
response time isn't as important as you'd think. What
ends up happening is two or three listers get into
"teacups" arguments, consisting of back-and-forth
repartee where the quoted material is longer than the
responses, instead of condensing their thoughts into
one coherant reply every few hours.
When we discussed moderation in the past, the group
majority decided to be self-moderating in this aspect;
i.e., posts shouldn't be automatically reviewed and
censored for this kind of thing, but that every group
member would make an effort not to waste the bandwidth
and storage space at yahoogroups and take
responsibility for posting in a more reasonable
manner. As I recall, the group decided that sending
private email to the offender, reminding him/her to
observe the guidelines on this matter, was okay (but
don't do it on-list; see next point).
3. If you have a problem with someone's posting
content, style, frequency, etc., don't write to the
whole list about it. Per the self-moderating policy
the group agreed to when this issue came up last,
write to that person privately and suggest they stop
excessive quoting/ personal ranting/ one-liners/
whatever you are objecting to. You can CC me if you
want to. You can send private email and ask me to do
it on your behalf. You can also write about it on
BACKSTAGE. But spare the list.
This is a largely democratic assembly, as you all
know. If someone wants to put up a poll on the
groups.yahoo.com website, asking whether posters
should be confined to two (or four, or five, or some
other number) of posts per day, go for it -- if the
majority is in favor of a posting limit, I'll back it
up. Many lists have this policy as a matter of
conserving bandwidth. This group has not wanted
posting limits in the past. If that has changed and
the majority are now in favor of it, someone stick up
a poll and you can all vote.
For the record, the only kind of moderation that
currently exists is that a new member's very first
post has to be approved by me before it goes to the
list. This is how I end up catching and deleting two
or three "BY MY NEW RAP CD" and "HOT CHIX HERE" emails
a week from hit-and-run spammers. I wish there were a
way of catching people who quote the entire digest
before it's distributed to the list, but there's not,
or else that would be moderated, too.
But, as with any democracy, the rules can change if
the people want -- and you can call elections at any
time using the web polling interface.
And if anyone has a problem with this, respond to
BACKSTAGE so we can get the main Vocalist back on
track with singing content.
Isabelle B.
moderator-at-large
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