Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> Did this turn into a moderated group recently, with the moderator
> taking two days to post messages??

Yes, Qalam changed into a moderated group, but this did not happen
recently: I probably did this around 2001, after the first few spam
messages hit the list.

So far, this has been almost unnoticeable to most people, because all
frequent posters (or, indeed, all posters who did not look like
spammers) have been in the "white list", i.e. were allowed to post
without moderation.

Only people who never posted before (the so-called "lurkers") are
normally in moderated status but, as soon as they posted their first
few in-topic messages, they pass in the white list (or, if they posted
things like "Buy viagra and get a free mortgage", they get silently
expelled and banned).

Recently, however, I have seen an outburst of OT messages, pointless
flames, ad personam attacks... And this is not the kind of discussions
that I, and probably everybody else, would like to read on Qalam!

I thought that the time to play the tyrant finally came, so I turned
*most* Qalamites who had been active in the last few weeks into
moderated mode, in an attempt to prevent more OT and flames, and to
have an opportunity to tell people "Hey, stop that!".

Ironically, as soon as I was psychologically ready to impersonate the
intolerant censor, all the OT's and flames suddenly stopped, so I had
to waste my time approving a lot of perfectly in-topic and polite
messages...

I guess this means that everybody realized by themselves that it was
time to adopt a more affable behavior. So I guess that a tyrant was
not needed, after all, and the only thing left to do now is to put
people back in the white list, as this is much more convenient for
everybody.

In the future, please everybody keep into reasonable off-topic quota,
and avoid engaging in polemical arguments.

Alternatively, pelase transgress for a time long enough to allow me to
have a try at my ACME dictator's toolkit! :-)

Regards.
Seshat (Qalam admin)