MonTemplar's Journal: Clean up /. home page, the MT way!

This was originally posted as a comment to one of Em's recent rants, but I'm reposting it here so I can get some feedback from you guys (and gals)...

I've gone to the Homepage Preferences, and done the following :

1. Checked the boxes for all Sections except Articles, Features and Polls.
2. Checked all the Topics that I'm not particularly interested in.

In my case, I've been pretty ruthless about stuff I've turned off :

• All games console topics.
• All Linux-related topics.
• Most Open-Source related topics.
• Most Apple-related topics.

I have since unchecked the Section bars for Apache and BSD, as those are low-volume and do have the occasional interesting article.

Going to the individual sections to look for stuff isn't that hard - well, unless you have a fit when you seen the Games section colour scheme, that is. :-)

Obviously, your choices will probably be different from mine.

Oh, and I do meta-mod regularly, so there's less chance of me missing out on an article that I might not otherwise see...

Article

[sql*kitten]

This [shirky.com] is an interesting article - about how online communities carry the seeds of their own destruction, because techno-utopian ideals don't work in practice. You can't separate the social side from the technical underpinnings, and if you don't have lead programmers who are also adept political leaders, things go to hell.

A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group ...
The cor

Re:Article

[MonTemplar]

I can certainly relate to the stuff about Usenet, having being fairly active back around the time of the creation of the rec.arts.sf and rec.arts.startrek, and from being a semi-regular poster to alt.callahans. In hindsight, the September That Never Ended was probably not the disaster that many of the academia-based old-timers claimed it was - in fact, I reckon it has contributed to keeping the whole Usenet system relevant enough that it hasn't joined the ranks of Gopher, Archie and Veronica, by allowing mo

Re:Article

[johndiii]

I moderate a Yahoo Groups list that was originally an eGroups list. I'm at least the third principal moderator; the "owner" of the list is long gone. It was difficult to find him a year and a half ago to add me as a moderator, but he does not want to give up control. Even though he is no longer even remotely involved. If I were unable to do the job, the list would be useless fairly quickly.

Community founders need to pay attention to the evolution of the community, and be prepared to give way to new

Moo

[Chacham]

I just get it in the summary email. Takes just a few minutes to read, and is very clean.