Please stay on-topic. (was Re: [Asterisk-Users] Sparco Office Supplies...)

[Steve Kann]

Christopher L. Wade wrote:

> Kanuri, Seshu (Company IT) wrote:
>
>>  Why are we allowing this A**hole to spam all of us to visit his site
>> which has nothing to do with Asterisk or VOIP?
>>
>
> Read the rest of the posts in this thread, I've already defended 
> myself once, do I need to do it again?  [*** + * + ** = assume]
>
You have to keep defending yourself, because even on the face of it, 
your request for 8000 people to read your message and do your research 
for you, for free, was presumptuous. 

The 8000 people (using your number) subscribed to this list in order to 
learn, and help each other with asterisk, not as a forum for each of 
those 8000 members to ask for free help from each other for any topic 
under the sun.

The volume of mail on this list, and the number of people who ask poor 
questions (see http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html) is 
already very high.  If everyone did the same as you, the list would be 
completely unusable for it's original purpose, and everyone loses. 

So, it's clear that we can't all just ask everyone to help us with 
everything, so how can we decide what is appropriate?  When should one 
person's personal problem become everyone's problem?
The only answer is to keep the list on-topic, because we all learn from 
other's questions, and the responses to them, but only when they are 
good questions.   That's why everyone joined this list.

In this case, you're off-topic query, just like most off-topic posts, is 
unfair to the list, because it only helps you, but it causes a flood of 
off-topic mail that all 8000 subscribers need to shovel through 
(including this response, which I still haven't decided whether to send 
to the list or not).

Maybe somewhere, there's a mailing list for people who like to do free 
business research for other people, or a list for amateur private 
investigators.  Your post would be on-topic there.

So, I think I will send this to the list, in the hopes that it will help 
improve the level of conversation, but with apologies if it ends up just 
adding to the clutter.

-SteveK