[Consim-l] CBI Games?

[Markus Stumptner]

On Tue, 7 Nov 2006, Allan Rothberg wrote:
> Alas, single channel servers, like this mailing list, are a lot more
> vulnerable to flame wars and off topic postings as there is no way to
> avoid those distractions except by selectively paging past them. What's
> more, there is no way to partition conversations, and that may be worse.
> If, for example, a thread opens up here on ASL, and I happen to have no
> interest in ASL, I have to wade through all the ASL posts and try and
> spot the posts that are of interest to me.

On the contrary - you may have to wade past the subjects, but not through
the posts. One of the main advantages of mailing lists over a CSW style
forum.

> There's not much recourse to
> that, however, short of splitting up a single mailing list into dozens,
> or even hundreds of specialized mailing lists and then you are back to
> the CSW model.

I find this rather ironic since so much of CSW is offtopic chatter
regardless of where one goes, and so many flame wars going on.  I've come
to the conclusion that flamewars and noise just go hand in hand with a
large subscriber population. We had people who kept complaining on CSW
about the flamefests on this list for years, long after the volume had
gone down and the flamefests had moved over to CSW.  BGG is a bit more
civil but in exchange it's far more clueless and inane in general.

> Is there a solution? I dunno. I do continue to subscribe to this list,
> perhaps simply for nostalgia's sake, although the occasional gem does
> pop up from time to time.

I don't think there is a solution, really. But it's not, in my opinion, a 
crippling problem. 

> Perhaps we can redefine the use of this list for an On the Table/After
> Action Reports mailing list. That is not to say that it can't also
> continue to be used for other purposes as well.

Sorry Allan, but I see no point in a redefinition.  We get a few posts per
month, and then the solution is to slice it more thinly?  Some people post
their replays here anyway if they want.  Personally, I have little enough
time to even play so there's not many replays to post. But I'm not going
to post more just because more basic design discussions of the type that
Mircea likes to kick loose are no longer consider on-topic.

Ultimately, the condition will not change. If one wants to see more 
postings of type X on a particular forum (list or otherwise) the fastest 
way is to start posting them. :-)  People may take this up or not, but 
at least there will be a seed to grow on.

Ironically, low-volume discussion websites suffer even more from this. At
least with a mailing list you see all the posts.  A CSW-style multi-folder
interface makes it seriously painful to find the bits that actually have
new traffic. (Been there, done that.)

Markus

Last 3 games played: Ligny (NLC), Borodino, Air Cav
--------------- http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/user/mst/games/ ---------------
"Bakayaro! Bakayaro!"  ("Stupid Bastards!  Stupid Bastards!") -- Admiral 
Aritomo Goto's last words to his staff, October 11, 1942