> Van: William K. Borsum <borsum@DASCOR.COM>
> Aan: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Onderwerp: Thoughts on Identifying [OT] stuff
> Datum: woensdag 18 augustus 1999 0:37
>
> Greetings all:
> Just wanted to toss an idea out and see if anyone salutes:
>
> [OT] is used, in theory, to identify things that are "Off Topic" for this
> list.  As has been pointed out, there are OT topics that are technical
and
> pertinent to the list in one way or another, and other topics that are
> truly non-technical.
>
> How about [TOT] or some such for "Technical, but Off Topic" and [NOT] for
> "Not Technical, and way Off Topic"?

Hello Kelly,

   Creating more-and-more strings to filter on is IMHO not the way to go.
I would suggest  a single "mark" with a specification added to it.

Something like : "[OT]{specification} -"

This way an all-out filter is easily constructed, but un-filtering
sub-groups like "[OT]Cowtipping -" is feasible too ... :-)

It's the non-standard use of the [OT] mark ([Way OT] , [Somewhat OT-ish] ,
[OT to the max] , etc) that made any kind of filtering impossible :-(

Greetz,
  Rudy Wieser