[MUD-Dev] Re: ADMIN: Advertising on MUD-Dev

[Mike Sellers]

At 10:38 AM 8/8/98 -0700, J C Lawrence wrote:
>  I was hoping to avoid this particular corner of the 'net world, but
>that seems not to be.
> ...
>  We now have list members who are using various free email services,
>and in particular email services which append or prepend avertising to
>all messages sent thru them (eg yahoo).  Sooner or later one of them
>is going to request posting authority.  This very much rubs me the
>wrong way: I have no interest in being the host for another's
>advertising.  I especially have no interest in cannonising their
>advertising for posterity in the web archives for the list.

I'm going to take what appears at this point to be the minority opinion,
and ask what the fuss is about?  Is the space the ads take up in email or
on disk really that big of a deal?  Is storage really _that_ expensive?  I
find it hard to believe.  And isn't this list already "adulterating" posts
by appending "MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future." to every post --
and archiving those bytes with every post? =20

>From what you've said, I suspect that your concern stems from the
now-quaint notion that commerce has no place on the Net, that the Internet
was made to be free, dammit (ignoring all the tax and commercial dollars
poured into making that way initially, of course).  Further, I get a whiff
of techno-elitism in the comments I've read so far: e.g., people who have
free email can't really be all that interested in playing or creating MUDs
(demonstrably false), or people who can't be bothered to pay $20/month for
non-advert email don't really have a place here. =20

Ultimately, I'd say that decisions on posting privileges should be made by
considering only the potential content that the individual brings to the
list.  So long as adverts are not egregious, why make them the focus, the
filter of whether someone has a voice here or not?  Perhaps next you might
exclude those who could potentially espouse unpopular political or
religious beliefs?  Suppose I wanted to start a discussion of designing a
ChristianMUD or BuddhaMUD or LimbaughMUD -- would that be get my postings
bounced too? =20


Now, you may say that I'm making too big of a deal about this, and that is
exactly my point.  Adverts in email are at this point a reality every bit
as much as @s and list-servs, and they're not going away.  There's no
reason to make a big deal out of their presence by excluding those who use
free email simply for that reason. =20

So, what to do?  We clearly don't want the list and archives clogged with a
lot of unproductive verbiage (umm... not that the many, many posts here are
uniformly filled with pearls of wisdom), and yet I at least don't like the
idea that we begin to exclude whole classes of people for reasons unrelated
to their experience or content.  Why not go ahead and extend posting
privileges to those with free email who might ask, if you would have done
so anyway -- with the proviso that you reserve the right to prune the ads
from their mail, refuse their posts, and/or revoke their privileges if, in
your judgement, the adverts become too onerous.  This is no more and no
less than you might do with a new poster who had an unusually long (or
commercial >cough<) sig file.  I don't see any reason for a new policy in
this case.


--

Mike Sellers=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 Chief Creative Officer=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 The=
 Big Network
mike at bignetwork.com=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0
<http://www.bignetwork.com/>http://www.bignetwork.com

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