Twyndyllyngs on Star's End

[Peter Korsten]

Op 5-12-2011 22:18, Bill Fox schreef:

> If any of my posts are against the rules of the music-bar, I will be
> more than happy to discontinue them. But I was under the impression that
> I wasn't doing anything against the rules, courtesy, or accepted barian
> practices. Please correct me if I am in error.

Put it this way: I've been a member of a variety of mailing lists over 
the past 20 years, and the point of a mailing list is that you can 
subscribe and unsubscribe, based on your interest.

As such, subscribing one mailing list to another is a definite no-no, 
because you take away the possibility of subscribers to decide what they 
want to get: if they subscribe to the Music Bar, they get all of Bill 
Fox's bulk mailings as well.

The argument that one can set up a filter is really a non-starter, 
because the onus shouldn't be on me to have to go through the trouble of 
having to set up a filter to weed out messages that I never asked for in 
the first place.

So from that point of view, your regular postings are a breach of 
netiquette.

Now, do I, personally, care about that? Not really. If I see 'Galactic 
travels', I immediately hit the 'delete' button. Reason being, you are a 
nice guy, and we've had too much of these silly arguments in the past. 
No need to kick a riot about that.

But... you actually appear in the list of top posters, purely based on 
your bulk mailings. I think that the non-bulk e-mails coming from you in 
the last 12 months can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

And as to whether this is the Music Bar or the Gear Bar or the Cat Bar 
(did I mention that we have four cats these days?) or whatever, I think 
it's mostly a People's Bar: we're here because we're interested in one 
another. It just so happens that we all play musical instruments, but 
the focus is ourselves.

In that setting, an impersonal bulk e-mail can feel intrusive.

- Peter