Safe Place to Vent / List Volume

[Dicentra spectabilis]

--- In HPFGU-Catalogue at yahoogroups.com, "a_silmariel" <silmariel at t...>
wrote:

> > This is what I was afraid would happen after so many of the best  
> > posters transferred to Admin last summer. A dilution of standards.
> Said so to Admin, too. There aren't enough high quality posters to set
> and maintain the standard we'd all like to see. 

Hee!  Yeah, that's a phenomenon we MEGs have all observed and
understand all too well, especially after seeing so many good members
run away screaming into the night after being immolated by list politics.

That's why we issued a call for volunteers last time, so we could get
the involvement of lurkers who don't much like to post but still have
good enough admin skills.  That way, we wouldn't be effecting a brain
drain on the list.  Or as much as usual.

> Can we get Amanda back on site to whip 'em into line? They'd either
> improve or leave, whining about how unfair it all is.
> 
> I was once under her fire. I survived (barely). Can we convince her? 
> Does she accept bribes?  

Amanda's absence is mostly a function of a heavy work schedule (people
quit or got fired and she was left holding the bag).  She'd be
involved if she weren't buried in a heap of documents to edit.  Take
it from me: when you write and edit for a living, even if you have the
*time* to participate on the list, you don't have the brain cells to
do so.

I think that given her druthers, she'd be on HPfGU.

As for the problems caused by the upsurge (and it has been *really*
high -- on Jun 29-30 we acquired 123 new members, when 20 is a normal
two-day take), we're hashing it out on MEG right now.  

Just FYI, during the first two weeks of July, only 14% of the newbies
who joined during July also started to post.  That's 54 new posters. 
About 65% of all posts came from unmoderated members.

We thought about making it so that people can't post right after they
join (to make them read up for a bit), but the only way we can do that
is make the archives viewable to the entire Internet (including the
Google bots) and then requiring approval before joining. The consensus
on Feedback was that people don't want potential employers Googling
their ID and producing HPfGU posts.  There are also the myriad legal
entanglements of exposing posts of people who posted under the
assumption that the archives would *not* be public.

Yahoo allows you to set members to "cannot post" (they can read), but
you have to do it manually: you can't automatically set new members to
"cannot post."  We're hashing out a way to get newbies to read the
posting guidelines before posting.  Stay tuned...

So, we can't do what Hogs_Head did because they set up the site with
public archives from the get-go; we didn't.

Anyway, school being out isn't the only factor in the upsurge: there's
the PoA movie, and the new canon from JKR's site is bringing back lots
of oldbies.  Then she gave the Fan Site Award to the Lexicon, which
sent a lot of people our way because of the numerous mentions of and
links to HPfGU.  Heaven help us if HPfGU ever gets the FSA!

--Dicentra