It is a common-interest list -- for people who own labrador retrievers.
That encompasses a wide range of people, from pet owners to breeders, to
various competitors (obedience, hunting, etc).  It also encompasses a wide
variety of folks, not all with much respect for  difference of opinion,
academic standards, and the like.  Opinions can be quite fierce at times,
and at others, someone may malign a particular breeder or kennel or fellow
competitor and such.

When I first started the list, the archives gave me more headaches than
anything else, so I finally said the hell with it, deleted it, and never
looked back.  Never regretted it.  I do agree that gaining a "context" of
what's been discussed before could be helpful, but there are extensive help
and faq files available, and that's worked fine.  This (obviously) ain't
some fancy scholarly list (although as a former phd grad student, I know
those can get contentious too!  just not quite in the same way...)

Moderation might have been one answer, however with list volume and
subscriber levels being what they have been, I could never have kept up with
things, so I restrict reviews to new subscribers (I weed out a suprising
number of advertisers that way) and let the list go as it will otherwise.

--Cindy

On 7/5/06, Winship <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Cindy (Who?) wrote:
> > I've never liked archives.  I had the experience of new people coming
> > onto my forum, browsing the archives, becoming incensed at some
> > previous article or other that had mentioned them and demanding that I
> > remove said offending articles.  (Mine are a contentious lot.)  My
> > solution was to drop archives entirely.
>
> What is the nature of you list, what type of list is it?
>
> Someone reading your list archives does not, I think, have the right to
> request, let alone demand, that something written by someone else be
> removed
> unless it is provable libel/slander or a violation of copyright.  If the
> person simply doesn't like it, well, that's too bad, tough luck.
>
> As I said, I don't know what type of list(s) you run, but all of mine are
> of the "academic discussion" type, and the list archives are viewed as an
> asset: one can look up previous discussion before posting the same
> question
> yet again, or find something one didn't save at the time (or did but
> lost).
> It is also a historical record of the list, and a record of what the
> concerns of the subscribers, and the profession at large, have been at any
> given time (they change with the years).  It may be that the list archives
> contain information obtainable nowhere else.
>
> If someone wants to subscribe to my largest list, with archive back to
> 1990, just to see what he can gripe about, he's welcome.  With close to
> 112,000 individual items, if he reads two weeks of archives per day it
> will
> take him over a year to catch up to today, and then he will have to read
> the most current year's postings.
>
> I approve of the archives, and of the ability of the listowner to edit the
> archives when he must.
>
> Douglas Winship   [log in to unmask]
>
>