Admin-type reminder ahead of Friday

[Kelley]

Hi, everyone--

First thing, thanks for including spoiler warnings in your posts, 
guys!  Please continue this, everyone. 

Okay, now on to this.  I'm not going to comment point-by-point 
on Richard's post, but I wanted to make sure it was addressed.  
For those who don't know, we have a group called HPfGU-Feedback 
that was created for precisely this sort of discussion:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-Feedback/

Please, anyone who's interested, consider joining -- it's the 
best means the elves have for geting a real sense of how list 
members feel about group matters (plus list members can see how 
other list members feel). :-)  

So, even though our policy is strict about keeping policy 
/ administrative discussions off of main, OTC, Movie, I want to 
post a reply to what Richard has said.

I'm one of the elves here, and while I don't read every message, 
I do read most, though I often can get behind.  I spend most of 
my Movie list attention on keeping out spam and sending through
the messages from real list members and demodding those folks so 
they can post freely.  A couple other list elves do the same, 
including following the discussions here.

It has indeed been a while since the elves have done any strong 
moderating over here, as plenty of you are aware.  Richard's 
right that it's mainly because Movie is considerably slower, 
though there's a little more to it.  Here's a sort of boiled-down 
explanation:

Back when OoP was released (late June, '03), the elves were 
prepared for it to be really bad, but it was at least 50% worse 
than what I was expecting. <g>  For many weeks the elves were 
spending hours and hours each day just attending to main.  Of 
course, Movie and OTC were considerably neglected through all of 
that.  Once things settled down a bit, we began keeping a better 
eye on them.

A big thing we noticed (and it continues) is that so many people 
top-post (happens on all the groups, though main is the only place 
we have been strictly enforcing the rule against).  The elves 
grumbled about it amongst themselves (along with grumbles about 
lack of snipping, lack of capitalization, lack of attribution, 
lack of sigs, etc., etc., etc.).  But, one thing was different -- 
we weren't hearing the usual complaints from listies that we'd 
always heard before.

Now, surely there are a million reasons for this, the main one 
being, "*You guys* are the mods, you've got your rules -- do your 
jobs!"  Absolutely right.  Thing was, for me at any rate, absent 
the independent confirmation we'd always gotten from list members 
before, I began to wonder if maybe the regular posters on Movie 
(and OTC) just weren't bothered by those things very much.  I 
wondered if maybe people liked things better this way, if list 
members liked the 'hands-off' atmosphere more, if they were glad 
the rules Nazis were leaving this group alone. :-)

So, basically, I was hesitant to fix anything if no one seemed to 
feel it was broken.

Now, I have a pretty good idea that feelings on this fall into 
the usual categories -- some people hate the lack of adherence to 
the rules and want the elves to crack down and clean things up; 
some won't care one way or the other; and some will be strongly 
against anything that changes how things have been recently.  

Regardless, I'd still love to hear everyone's thoughts on any 
of this.  My apologies to anyone who doesn't want to see this 
discussion here (that's the primary reason we keep discussions 
like this on Feedback), and also my apologies for delving into 
this so close to GoF Day, <g> but this is really important to 
us.  Of course, if anyone would rather just comment to the elves 
directly, that'd be great, too, or if y'all would indeed rather 
have this discussion on FB -- any of these options would be good.  

We just want everyone to know that not only is it okay to contact 
us about things like this, we *encourage* it, and that certainly 
doesn't get said often enough.  Input from list members is the 
greatest way we have of knowing what issues matter most to you 
all, what things need more attention from us, and so on.  It 
helps us to do our jobs *so* much better.

Last thing I'll say here is that we want to reassure folks that 
we want to do better by this group, so again, if you have any 
specific concerns you want to see addressed, we'd love to hear 
from you.


--Kelley Elf