"Eeep -- we're being hit by a wave of spam!"

[jducoeur]

Well, that was my first reaction when I saw 300 messages slamming into our mailbox. My second reaction was, "Wait -- where is it all going?" My third reaction was, "Oh: it's all being filtered into sca-east".

And that (plus a quick skim of said wave of messages) is a pretty good summary of why I find myself unable to pay any attention to that mailing list any more. No offense to elizabear, but there's a posting brewing for The Art of Conversation, to be titled something like "Laissez-faire and the Tragedy of the Commons in the Market of Words"...

Comments

[cellio]

That's really hard to deal with. I see it on other lists too (dropped off sca-east some years back, so curious only in that look-at-the-messy-car-wreck sort of way about this). You can filter the problem poster, but that doesn't help with the replies to that person, which is where most of the traffic comes from. Occasionally it gets bad enough that a list owner is willing to burn the karma points by kicking someone off, but that's rare. So everyone gets to suffer, sigh, and wait for it to end. :-(

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Three of the most egregious posters in the latest SCA-EAST debacle are already in my killfile, but thanks to topposters who don't trim their posts, the hysteria ends up in my In Box anyway :-/

Along those lines, there's a Speshul Snowflake whose bursts of psychodrama have caused our local listserv to shrivel into an announcement board. The listowner did eventually give her a "One More Strike and You're Out" warning; the level of drama has gone down--but the traffic hasn't come back :-(