Thanks for your comments, Philip.
I have been very disappointed by the poor signal-to-noise ration on
birding-aus lately. It's always been the sort of forum where people have
been free to chat about side issues, and where topics gradually move away
from birding discussion, but usually there has been something worthwhile to
read in most of these exchanges.
Not so for some, and the amount or irrelevant banter, and in some cases
rudeness and intolerance, has been increasing. I hold myself partly
responsible for this because I've been running birding-aus at an arm's
length over the last year or two - relying very heavily on the fantastic
ongoing work of other moderators - while finding my feet in a new career. I
think it is time I got back on top of things, following all the threads,
reminding contributors when they are overstepping the lines, and nipping
any problems in the bud.
This is a good opportunity to remind everyone of our code of conduct.
Please remember that messages sent to this list should not
1. be of a purely commercial nature
2. contain offensive or inappropriate language
3. contain personal attacks
4. contain attachments of any sort [* See below]
5. exceed 20Kb in size [* See below]
6. include all of the original message if replying (use only what's
needed for clarity)
7. stray too far from our main topics: Australian birds, their habitat &
conservation
Given that Birding-Aus has been around for about 18 years, the archive is
quite a useful resource for anyone searching for information about a
species or location. I need to spend some time cleaning it up again and
getting rid of a lot of material that doesn't justify the storage space it
is taking - please be patient!
One or two things have changed about the Internet in 18 years, and I'm
surprised that so many people still use email and mailing lists like
Birding-Aus. I'm experimenting with a few ideas to make this forum a bit
more user-friendly and relevant - I think we should allow images to be
posted, but I don't want to suddenly have messages with 20 image
attachments, or huge 10Mb images. I'd be interested to hear readers'
thoughts - but off-list at first, please. I'd like Birding-Aus to get back
to being about *birds* instead of about birders, or about birding online.
or about birding-aus itself!
Regards
Russell Woodford
Birding-Aus Founder
On 14 April 2013 20:06, Philip,kylie,Joshua,noah
<>wrote:
> Having been on this forum for only a few months and only relatively new to
> this type of discussion, I find it some what childish and a form of
> bullying to be constantly corrected on spelling mistakes or incorrect use
> of the "english" language. The first thread regarding the night parrot or
> should I say the Night Parrot was a great insight into the unknown world of
> this elusive and hard to see species, and any sightings or possible
> sightings of this species would be of significant importance to birding
> fraternity as well as other organisations that would be interested.
> However this thread has taken a back seat to the mundane and slightly
> "well actually highly irritable" thread on the use of English language and
> the need to have capitals or no capitals and the relevance to birding_aus
> members is too me a little outdated.
> Would it not be better to commend the thread and respond accordingly
> rather than pick up on a small spelling mistake that is truthfully
> irrelevant to the overall story, I have only posted once on here and the
> reason I have not posted again was that every response bar one was only to
> correct me on my spelling or misuse of bird names!
> At present Facebook is alive with posts regarding how childish and
> irrelevant the posts are on birding_aus and that most people have decided
> to not post or at worse not subscribe due to the same bullying behaviour I
> experienced. I believe that there may only be a small group of people
> actually doing this but it gives the whole site a really bad taste in mouth.
> If you were a new or inexperienced birdwatcher/ bird lover and stumbled
> across birding_aus in the last week it would be some what amusing to see
> basically no threads regarding birds but 50 threads regarding capital
> letters!
> I understand my English isn't up to scratch and am expecting to be
> inundated by abusive emails but I believe it needs to be said that if this
> continues the amount of falloff subscribers will be greater than the
> useless threads about the use of common names!
> Cheers
> Philip
> ===============================
>
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
> send the message:
> unsubscribe
> (in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
> to:
>
> http://birding-aus.org
> ===============================
>
===============================
To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to:
http://birding-aus.org
===============================
|
