RE: Farewell to UT's vectorlist

G'day Paul, Joe, Neil and folks,

Many thanks to the vectorlist owners for the time and effort that they've
put in through the years! I've always appreciated their focus on this
forum's S/N ratio. If you don't want to read my opinions on vectorlist
policy (before it's effectively transferred to Neil), stop reading now.

Commerce is a slippery slope with Clay/Roy at the top and Ebayer's at the
bottom. We'd all like to draw a line somewhere in between, but some of us
will be caught below this line and not be able to post our FS. Then the
complaints start from the people below the line about how "all sellers
should be equal". Finally, list policy must be reexamined (at great cost in
time to the list owners), and either the line is redrawn or the list owners
give up.

The only compromise that I can see is stating "all sellers are _NOT_ equal
on this list." Clay and Roy are special, and if some new seller would like
to be put in that group then go through some democratic and automatic
process. The same process could be used to remove special sellers that
start spamming (as defined by the general consensus of the list readers).

This solution should prevent the list owner from spending large amounts of
time while allowing the community to start part way down the slippery slope
of commerce. Unfortunately, as in any democracy, the list reader's must
participate (say in an semi-annual review of special sellers?) for this to
be a success.

            Steve Ozdemir
            sozdemir@att.com

ps - Participation of list readers would be ensured if unreturned votes in
the semi-annual election of "special sellers" resulted in dropping people
from the list.

Also, clearly a large number of Ebayers could show up and make a mockery of
the "special sellers" list. That's when the list owner shows up and redraws
the line emphasizing that in rare circumstances email lists are not a true
democracy and won't be subject to that kind of abuse.

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul_Labuda@Dell.com [mailto:Paul_Labuda@Dell.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2000 10:27 AM
To: vectorlist@lists.cc.utexas.edu
Cc: jwelser@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
Subject: Farewell to UT's vectorlist

> I'm terribly sorry that everybody's been so ruffled over this recent
> policy spat. Since Joe bowed out, and Neil and company have started a new
> vectorlist, I'm going to shut this one down in a day or so. It's been
> nice managing the list when everybody's been civil, but I don't want to
> anger any more people over such a trivial matter. Neil, if you could post
> instructions on how folks can move over to vectorlist and rasterlist at
> your server, I'd appreciate it.
>
> I have promised in the past that I would not distribute the mailing list
> for vectorlist *ever*, so you'll all have to resubscribe at synthcom. I'm
> sorry about the inconvenience, but I am very sensitive to distributing
> e-mail lists because of the problems we have with spam these days. I'm
> not accusing anybody on vectorlist of selling the list; it's more the
> principal of the thing.
>
> I will be signing on to the "new" vectorlist once I see how to do so.
> It's been an honor to serve you. Have fun with commerce on the "next
> generation."
>
> I'd suggest that anybody who's keeping archives of vectorlist contact me
> immediately if you need some more time to back up the messages. I'm not
> sure if UT will hang on to the archives once the list is deleted.
>
> - Paul Labuda
Received on Wed Jan 12 11:00:27 2000