On Tue, 6 Aug 1996, White Wolf wrote:

On Mon, 5 Aug 1996, Travis Butler wrote:

6a. Smug complacency and stagnation (the purists flame everyone who asks

The Ranma List.

6b. Maturity (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants

The Fanfic List.

To tell the truth, I'm not too sure of this. I'd sort of add a third
category:

6c: Anarchy (the list veers further and further from its supposed topic
towards being a social list for one or several cliques of the readers.
Certain amounts of on-topic discussion remain, but it is often drowned out
by the volume of in-jokes and irrelevant discussion.  For those
participating in the cliques, which may be highly formal or highly
informal, the list and the conversation on it are highly fulfilling.
Outside the cliques, reaction to the posts ranges from amusement to
tolerance to disgust. Some readers outside of the cliques remain to try
and winnow out the relevant discussion, others quit because the effort to
reward ratio isn't worth it.  Many potential subscribers avoid the list
for the same reason.  Depending on how vocal the social content is, the
list may move back towards 5 or seem to settle to 6b for a time, but
generally, the irrelevancy returns before too long.)

I mean, some friendly and irrelevant discussion can liven a list up from
stagnation, but  when a list has to develop a custom subject tag for its
noise, and when that noise accounts for between a half and two-thirds of
the messages to the list, it is a signal that something's not entirely
perfect.

BTW, our happy population is over 300 now.

And I'd say about 12-20 of them, at most, account for at least 75% of the
list's considerable volume...

Scott Johnson, who's actually been keeping a record of the Fanfic/C&C/Spam
ratio...