Moderation and off-topic discussion [was Re: Bigotry and hate speech...]

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 07:30 pm, James McMahon wrote:

> Can the moderators please get involved here and remind people to address
> python related topics and questions on the python mailing list? 

This isn't just a mailing list, it is also a newsgroup (Usenet). The
newsgroup is unmoderated, and the mailing list administrators don't
moderate each and every message.

Besides, this forum does have a higher tolerance for off-topic discussions.

(At least collectively -- individuals, of course, vary in their tolerance to
off-topic discussion.)

The best we can do is ask people to change the subject line when the topic
drifts sufficiently far from the original topic, or to use the time-
honoured convention of labelling posts with a tag such as OFF-TOPIC (OT) or
META, POLITICAL, etc so as to allow readers to delete/filter things they
aren't interested in.

But your point is taken. We can have a bit of restraint. Sometimes its hard
to remember that we don't *have* to respond to every comment or statement
we disagree with *wink*

I'm sorry that this thread (and others like it) aren't to your liking. The
other python mailing lists run out of python.org (e.g. Python-Dev, Tutor,
Python-Ideas, etc) are kept much more on topic, but unfortunately they are
also much more specialised.

I know it seems that sometimes these threads will never end, but I've been
here for something like 15 years and they do, eventually, end. And not just
when the participants die of old age *wink*

In the meantime, people can help by posting their own new threads. If you
don't have a question to ask, you could always post an observation. What's
the coolest feature of Python you use? Got some good stories of brilliant
Python code you've seen, or even horror stories of awful code? Just learned
about some amazing feature in Python that you want to share? Go right
ahead! Most of us won't bite!



-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.