Okay I agree with you on what you say and I will not
ask for the removal of OT tag again since it is a
large and important part of PIClist according to your
statistics. Just remember that "OT is not intended to
be an avenue for regular political comment". That is a 
very important point. There is often no right or wrong 
when politics and religion are involved. 

"Quite some OTs are not really OT but legitimate EE."
I do sometime read OT using gmane and I know this.
Any decent news reader like Outlook Express or
Thunderbird are doing a good job of sorting list
posts when using gmane.

As James pointed out, PIClist.com is also a very good
place to read the archives. 

I also think IT stuff should be able to be inside EE
(sorry to "contaminate" the EE tag, Russel) since EE 
can be interpreted as "Everything Engineering".

Proper tagging is important but I think "[PIC] Re: 
[OT]:Is C30 price set by Microchip???" is proper
tagging. Some people may have different opinions
though. I tend to sympathize with him as well since I
am using Outlook at work and it is really not a very
good tools when it comes to spam filtering and reading
posts.

Regards,
Xiaofan

-----Original Message-----
From: Russell McMahon
Sent: Monday, August 08, 2005 6:30 PM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Cc: Chen Xiao Fan
Subject: Re: [OT] Propper TAGGING


Xiao Fan - as you aren't subscribed to OT I'll copy this to you.
I agree with most of what you post, but on this occasion we differ 
:-).

A fond dream, but it's not how it would work (probably).

- About 1/3 of recent posts are OT.

- Posts that have attachments are almost invariably not OT so that 
reduces the volume that OT occupies realtive to number.

- Many topics that are on OT are actually legitimate EE (eg 3 or 4 PWM 
IC). If there was no OT then people would still post most of these and 
get the tags right.

OT is not intended to be an avenue for regular political comment, and 
it largely isn't (it has it's momemnts)  so this is a "straw man"

Overall removing OT would probably reduce volume by no more than 20%.

*AND*

OT is one of the things which makes PICList great. Unless OT posters 
get grumpy and go on strike you can expect to find technical and / or 
interesting information on many other topics which help make your life 
more rounded. People who subsribe to OT usually  have more rounded 
characters, get more out of life and are more liable to be voted most 
popular classmate of the year :-).

> By the way, I am not subscribing to [OT]

No comment :-)


        RM
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