[Beowulf] Status of beowulf.org?

[Joe Landman]

On 06/16/2012 06:50 AM, Herbert Fruchtl wrote:
> As a lurker of many years' standing, I am vehemently opposed to moderation. It
> slows down traffic (in the rare case that I do pose a question, it's because I'm
> desperate and want a response IMMEDIATELY!), is open to abuse, and it comes with
> a legal minefield (if let's say, a corporate lawyer at Intel/AMD/NVIDIA thinks
> they have been unfairly slagged off, they may go after the list owner).

so ... moderation stops this (going after the list owner) ... how?

I am not generally a huge fan of moderation.  However, I've seen some 
cases where various other list participants generally contribute nothing 
substantive to discussions, and only serve to annoy and inflame 
discussions with regular participants.  If these people cannot respect 
the list, the participants, they can either choose leaving or being 
moderated.

This said, in the past, on another list, I've been personally threatened 
with moderation, and had it enforced.  The list owners (wrongly IMO) 
felt I had done them a grievous insult, and enforced moderation on me. 
To call their reaction silly would be kind in my book (and no, I won't 
say who they were/are, so don't ask ... though others in that same 
situation with that list and those owners contacted me later to 
commiserate).  It was their list, and they have the right to take any 
action they wished, which they did, no matter how right or wrong headed 
it was/is.

A well moderated list (e.g. very light touch) will have a rich variety 
of users and be mostly spam and idiot free.  A poorly moderated list 
will turn into a sycophantic echo chamber.  One of the side affects of a 
well moderated list is a stable or growing population of participants. 
Conversely, a poorly moderated list tends to lose many of the voices one 
needs for a diverse exchange of views (as it tends towards echo chamber 
mode).

>
> Having said that, the current situation is obscure to say the least. I know a
> colleague at a British university, who is on the list, but whose posts always
> bounce. His attempts at contacting any list owners via the mailman interface
> were never answered.

I've heard this from a number of folks.  Some simply cannot post to the 
list for whatever reason.  Likely RBL/DUL blocking on email servers.  We 
build email annotation pipelines, that do a much better job than DUL/RBL 
lists.  DUL/RBL are daisy cutters*, annotation pipelines are scalpels. 
Chances are these people are the collateral damage associated with using 
RBL/DUL.


* A "daisy cutter" is a euphemism for a very large explosive device in 
which the shockwave, traversing a large field, could remove flowers from 
their stalks.  Have a look at youtube 
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_upy14pesi4) for an example.


>
> Back to lurking in my cave...
>
>     Herbert
>
> On 16/06/12 01:47, beowulf-request at beowulf.org wrote:
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>> Today's Topics:
>>
>>      1. Re: Status of beowulf.org? (Jan Wender)
>>      2. Re: Status of beowulf.org? (Bernard Li)
>>      3. Re: Status of beowulf.org? (Jonathan Aquilina)
>>      4. Re: Status of beowulf.org? (Chris Samuel)
>>      5. Re: Status of beowulf.org? (Bill Broadley)
>>      6. Re: Status of beowulf.org? (Joe Landman)
>>      7. Re: Status of beowulf.org? (Lyle Bickley)
>>      8. Re: Status of beowulf.org? (Chris Samuel)
>>      9. Re: Status of beowulf.org? (Bernard Li)
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2012 21:25:33 +0200
>> From: Jan Wender<j.wender at science-computing.de>
>> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Status of beowulf.org?
>> To: Beowulf Mailing List<beowulf at beowulf.org>
>> Message-ID:<4FDB8C2D.9030707 at science-computing.de>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Arend from Penguin replied and they are looking for the list. They would
>> like to continue hosting the list, but would ask for some volunteers to
>> administrate it.
>>
>> Cheerio, Jan
>


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics Inc.
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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        http://scalableinformatics.com/sicluster
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