Re: Postings

From
Date
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>On Sat, 21 Jan 1995, Jere H. Lipps wrote:
>
>> All of our bulletin boards' access was posted to sci.bio.paleo newsgroup
>> the other day by Una.  I certainly don't want some of the garbage I read
>> there on my list.  I don't think this was a good idea, but I guess we will
>> now find out.  Perhaps if we ignore the garbage, they'll go away.  On the
>> other hand, some of the postings are intelligent, but I'd think those
>> people would find the prof. lists anyway.
>>
>>Stefan Bengtson replied:

>And so would the others! What's wrong with letting the world know how to
>reach Paleonet? Any garbage that drops in we can always ignore, as you
>say, or reply to with a polite note that this is the wrong forum.
>

True enough.  I have no problem with letting the world know about paleo.
But I don't think jokesters and frivolous types should be told about these
things as though they are encouraged to use PaleoNet etc for their
electronic antics.  The previous suggestion by TomDeVrie@aol.com  that
sci.bio.paleo should be used for the general, non-professional comments,
and the professional nets. used for technical discussion seems appropriate.
So I am not complaining about amateur or passing interested persons
posting technical and well thought out comments to our lists, but I don't
think the kind very general, off-the-cuff silly stuff, and talks between
folks like I see more and more of on the dinosaur list, will promote the
professional use of PaleoNet, MicroPal, RadFolks, etc.  Once these things
get cluttered with too many non-technical comments, people will begin to
ignore them as a useful forum.  The dinosaur list, in my opinion, is
approaching that.  A slightly less severe problem is that all postings to
MicroPal, for example, are archived on our gopher and that takes some
memory and makes our server run more slowly in theory.

Let's inform people what the purpose of these lists is.  Perhaps Stefan,
you can send the polite notes to abusers, if we get any.


Jere H. Lipps
Professor, Department of Integrative Biology
Director, Museum of Paleontology
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
510-642-9006 fax 642-1822
jlipps@ucmp1.berkeley.edu