Posting volume etc.

[Geoff Bannister]

Hi!

Having just decided to request permission to come aboard HMS 
Feedback, I have just worked my way (I think) through message 471 and 
would add my own couple of thoughts on the subject of list volume. If 
these have already been voiced, my apologies.

I feel that there are a couple of areas in particular which cause 
problems, namely the repetition of ideas again (and sometimes again 
and again!) and what I have called the "tennis match" post.

An example of the first one was very common some time ago when a 
poster would write in to exclaim breathlessly that there was a boy 
called Mark Evans in the beginning of OOTP and was he related to 
Lily? Whereupon, many of us would silently groan "Oh no, not again". 
One of the problems in this area is not one of our making, namely the 
wretched Yahoo! search engine. If you want to search back any 
distance, it moves at a couple of hundred posts each time and, if you 
are not familiar with its quirkiness, you may think that the 
response "no matches found" indicates the end of the search instead 
of a need to plough further on into the great unknown in search of 
truth. As an aside, one thing I have done in my year-plus of 
membership has been to keep an archive of my own messages. This is 
not overweening pride but an aide-memoire to quickly track topics 
with which I've had an interaction. Then I am able to use that phrase 
for which perhaps I am renowned "May I draw your attnetion to the 
thread beginning at message XXXX".

The second area is where someone sends a post which is then responded 
to by an objector who chops up the first post and intersperses 
replies. To which the first poster respons and does something 
likewise so that the message gets longer and longer.

I agree that there has been a sharp rise in postings though I think 
the level began to drop after the buldozers demolished the Pillar of 
Storge except for the multiplicity of ideas both sensible and wacky 
on the Half Blood Prince. Perhaps the rush will abate, as it did 
after the huge volume of postings following the publiation of OOTP 
last year. I think most people take the line of concentrating on 
certain posts and leaving the rest. I returned from a holiday last 
Saturday to find a backlog of 1400 messages. After dutifully skimming 
through 800 or so, I thought "Blow this for a game of soldiers" and 
jumped forward to the latest.

Geoff