RE: I quit

["IN2TIME" <Gary@xxxx>]

Walt,

I have benefited from your "column" and will be sorry to see you quit
the list, or even to quit contributing to it, but I really wish you
hadn't used your "I Quit" thread to "test" the moderators or to impose
your rules on the DML. If you leave the DML (and possibly take a few
others with you), you will be diminishing the DLM's value to those who
remain. If you continue contributing to the list, I'm sure the rest of
us will benefit from it. If not, goodbye. Either way, I would really
like this thread to end (after this post makes it through :-) LOL

List,

Personally, I'm glad that I don't have to read the ~30% that the
moderators screen out. I'm also glad that those emails don't make it to
the archives. The list may be "self correcting", but the misinformation
in the archives lives on forever.

And as for not reading the ones that are offensive to me, how could I
have known that I would find things like "S*IT", or "A**HOLE", or "I'll
drop my car and destroy it unless Walt starts a new list" in an email
without reading it.

It's a tough call for the moderators to weed out the obscene, off-topic,
blatant advertising, etc.. I've even had a few of my posts "disappear".
I just figured the emails didn't even make it as far as the moderators,
so I changed anything that might be considered objectionable, and
re-submitted them. My posts have never been lost or rejected the second
time. No big deal! Really!

Once I quit the list for over a year because of one person who was
responding to almost all of the posts and telling everyone else they
were WRONG! It didn't matter to me that his answers were often "more
correct" than the posts he was criticizing. His methods were offensive
and aggravating (to me and to some others that I discussed it with
off-list). I contacted the moderators, to see if they could request
that the person "tone it down a bit". They told me that there was a lot
of support for the person because he provided valuable information. So I
quit. No big swan song. It just wasn't fun anymore so I quit. A year
or so later, I re-joined the list, and was pleased to see the person was
still providing value to the list, but his posts were much more polite
and "politically correct". Perhaps I had even mellowed out during my
year of absence/abstinence.

After all is said and done, few list members can honestly say that they
haven't benefited significantly from the existence of the DML. The DML
isn't perfect (yet :-), but where would each of the members (and their
cars) be today without it. Each of you need to answer this for
yourselves, and do what you think is right. 

Gary
www.IN2TIME.com