More About TBAY

[pippin_999]

Speaking for myself again:

One thing I learned back in art school was that it's very difficult
to criticize anyone's taste without hurting their feelings. 

 It's one thing for me to say that fantasy casting, to pick my own 
particular bugbear, doesn't appeal to me, and that *I* have 
trouble taking it seriously. It is quite another to say, even IMHO, 
that it's a load of old tosh. To imply that everyone who likes 
fantasy casting has a screw loose would  hardly be flattering.

It might not be amiss to add a note here about why the Movie list 
was spun off instead of being given a prefix on the main list. It 
was not because the List Elves felt that movie talk would be too  
fluffy. Rather, we anticipated a lot of people would want to 
discuss the Movie who hadn't read the books at all. We wanted 
to preserve the List as a book discussion group. So we had a 
very hard and fast rule about all movie references being on the 
movie list -- and then JKR herself made hash of the formula by 
comparing the books to the movies in an interview. 

What that points up is that any distinction between what's 
relevant to  canon and what's not is going to be arbitrary. 
If there's a perceived difference in the posting standards for TBay  
I think it has more to do with the shortcomings of the moderation 
process than with TBay per se. 

The standards *are*  different between moderated and 
unmoderated posts. Moderation is an instruction process, and 
just as you can flunk your driver's test for drifting over the speed 
limit even though  on the highway people do it all the time, 
moderated posts get sent back for flaws that would be passed 
over in a regular post. 

This isn't ideal, but the idea is that by the time someone is 
released from moderated status, they have an idea of what's 
expected of them. The alternative would be to either enforce a 
draconian posting standard on the list as a whole, or to allow 
newcomers to model themselves on the lower range of what's 
acceptable rather than the higher. It was the perception that this 
was happening which led to the institution of moderation for new 
members in the first place.

What does this have to do with TBay?  Well, very few list 
members have the confidence to assay a TBay post while they 
are still in moderation. If Elkins had tried to post her Crouch epic 
as a moderated member, or if she  had asked the List Elves 
whether it was too long, she might well have been directed to put 
it in the Essays folder of the file section instead.  

This would not have been  a judgement call on the relevance of 
Elkins's disquisitons,  but a decision for the convenience of 
members who may have   slow connections for which they are  
paying by the minute.


Pippin