Never mind Tbay, what about FILKS ?

[constancevigilance]

On this list and OT-Chatter, there was a certain degree of outrage 
when it was discovered that, apparently, the most senior members had 
decided to segregate themselves off into an elite list. Whether or 
not that actually happened is not the point of this post. What I AM 
seeing is some members wanting to banish certain types of posts. The 
TBAY and FILK posts are generally more difficult to construct, and 
thus are written by the most energetic and often, more skilled 
posters. If those posts are banished to a seperate list, wouldn't 
that tend to cause those very posters to wander away from the main 
list even more? Wouldn't it almost ENSURE that an elite list sucked 
off the best and brightest?

I'm appending this to Pippin's message because she is one of our most 
talented posters, and does post in both TBAY and FILK format. The 
main list would suffer greatly if she were made to feel unwelcome. 
Neither of these formats generate a great deal of bandwidth. FILKs 
are especially benign because they don't even take a thread with them.

I do think that the filks make a canon point. I don't recall any that 
were simply off-topic. In any case, filks are subject to the same elf-
moderation as any post. It is true that the quality of filks can 
vary. But the quality of all posts vary, too. Picking on just these 
posts in that regard is unfair.

We filkers do try to identify our filk posts in the header. I don't 
think it is too much trouble for those who do not like filks to 
simply delete them. The rest of us can simply regard filks as a bit 
of color in the list. I think most of us do use the FILK: prefix, 
too. If the complaint is inconsistency of header, we can try harder 
to standardize.

Constance Vigilance, proud filker, but not in the same class as Caius 
or Pippin