Edith,
Thank you for your St. Patrick's Day message, and for your subsequent
posting, sent directly to me, where you have realized, after the fact, that
your heartfelt St. Patrick's Day message did violate the list guidelines. It
is very easy to break the guidelines because we want personal contact and we
want to be a family. Many of us do not even know the quidelines are there,
and many of us forget about those stuffy, legalistic guidelines.
Look at all the traffic on this list today, and the number of
postings on the list, not just your posting, which technically or directly
violate the
guidelines. And this happens every day. A percentage of people on the list
has always favored listing everything and using the delete button whereas a
percentage, which includes me (a legally trained person) has always favored
compliance with the guidelines. I tried to alert people to the problem that
if, we were slowing down the UT system, our volume was too big, e.g.
non-compliance with the
guidelines was a problem. If our postings are monitored by the UT or
elsewhere, how can that academic institution justify providing services for
personal messages, poetry, humor pieces/jokes, etc? I assume that Barbara P
convinced UT to accept UT as an information exchange system and not a chat
room. Any new place will check with UT, and even the "slowness" factor,
without any indication of concern about list content, will be a problem. I
also assume that the UT has had rumblings about withdrawing services for some
time, and those rumblings were ignored and/or the options at UT, and
possiblity of the options of the list continuing to stay there, have not been
fully explored. I would like to know if the withdrawal of services by the UT
is a done deal; even if UT thinks it's a done deal there are things we can do
to make it not a done deal. We should, at a minimum, be able to stay with UT
until we find a replacement host.
I was surprised by your posting, but I do think that St. Patrick's
Day ought to be celebrated and that the guidelines can be bent, or ignored,
at times. However, we are in a real mess, and I think that the list is in
real danger. It will take a long time to get something set up at a new
place, even if everything goes well, and any experience we have had with UT
will impact upon negotiations with any potential host for the list. I hope
list members become very careful about their postings in this interim period
before we find a new home: this can be helpful in convincing UT to keep us as
well as convincing a new university to take us. What I said about the
guidelines before on this list was an interesting, legal-like argument to me,
but probably not interesting to anyone else on the list, but now concern with
the list guidelines and careful compliance with the guidelines may be the
survival of this list and its family.
Edith, your St. Patrick's Day message was an unintentional slip. I am
certain we all loved receiving and reading it. Happy St. Patrick's Day to
you! Katie
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