What Price Success? Improving Posting Quality on HPfGU

[nrenka]

As Yahoo ate my post and I'm working, I'll be brief.  All opinions in 
here are solely my own.

Super Post Combine Power--Activate!

> Shaun:
> I will read Half Blood Prince the day it is released (unless 
> something dramatic happens to stop me - which isn't impossible). By 
> the time a two week posting hiatus finishes, therefore, a period of 
> around 13 days will have passed in which the knowledge of the novel 
> will become far less fresh for me, and I almost certainly will have 
> forgotten many of the points I would be interested in raising.

May I kindly suggest that is what pen and paper or Notepad are for?  
You could take the time to write out a substantial, well-organized, 
canon-cited post that covers a number of issues, rather than a lot of 
short responses.  I have, on this list, volunteered to write up the 
FAQ for the book so we can try to short-circuit the inevitable flood 
of easily-answerable questions.  The material's not going to go away, 
after all.

<snip>
 
> And they do affect me personally, I must confess. My mid year break 
> (at University level) runs from the 25th May to the 24th July.
> 
> In other words, Half Blood Prince is being released a little over a 
> week before the end of my University holidays.
> 
> So a two week posting hiatus would mean that I am unable to comment 
> on the book during a period I am likely to have time to do so - and 
> the list will reopen just as my classes have started up again.

Well, I have a personal stake as well: I will be studying for 
comprehensives *all summer*.  As I plan on being rather active in 
trying to keep the list from degenerating into sheer anarchy, a break 
would be very nice to have time to process everything and spread out 
the flood of commentary.  We can't make everyone happy, alas.

> Tonya:
>
> I also feel it would be discriminatory to block posting and new 
> members to the group after HBP. I love the flood of posts right 
> after a book comes out.

You may; but have a thought for what has to happen to manage that 
flood.  It was tough enough to keep up reading, but to elf that must 
have been insane.

> In my opinion is that we need to make it clear to both old and new 
> members that rudeness and inconsideration will not be tolerated to 
> the point of zero tolerance. Where people get banded from posting 
> for a cool down period.

The problem with this is is that it's not really tone issues alone 
that we're dealing with.  For instance, this post of yours which I am 
responding to was top-posted--which is surely in the category 
of 'inconsiderate' per posting regulations, but isn't 'rude' in the 
sense per se.

I do expect tempers to flare as I expect a very specific set of idols 
to be smashed--but that's a different animal than the inevitable lack 
of snipping, top-posting, poor citation, one-liners, me-toos, 
frivolous questions, etc.  Frankly, I suspect most newbies who join 
in the rush would not really bother to READ what is sent out to them 
in their excitement, which means a lot more work in pendings.  A cool-
off period and the publication of a FAQ might do something to help 
this.

(I'm not sure what a 'banded' member would look like, either...:)

Perhaps one week, rather than two?

-Nora gets back to cataloging sequences