I suppose I should write this story down, before I totally forget all the details, although I've already misremembered much. This is not a happy tale, more of a cautionary one warning you of the dangers of miscommunication. It all started in mid-1998 I think. Heady times on the Hudson Leick Mailing List, as yet another flame war raged over the list. But this one was different, in that eventually one of the participants started bombing the list after he had been kicked off.

Seeing the need for increased security, the HLML was transferred to Onelist, which by the way has done a good job handling mailing lists for people. At that point in time, Dan was list master, the previous one having retired at this juncture. So he was all alone in enforcing policy and trying to maintain a modicum of civility in the new list. Back then we were (and still are) good friends, being both technical people and having quite a few philosophies in common. We had corresponded quite a bit so he knew that I was and still am a relatively stable and conservative guy.

So it came as no surprise to me when he asked me to be a co-administrator of the HLML. In truth he had been hinting at it for a month or two until I had warmed up to the idea. My main concern was that as an admin I would have to curtail my other activities. Certainly it seemed like bad form for me to contribute to the discussions while having the power to moderate or eject list members.

But a second problem that I had was the whole responsibility of it all. Having been in the IS Department at West Coast, I followed the dictum that there was only one real Administrator who was helped by several Operators. And so I didn't want a lot of power, although Dan insisted that I was quite capable of making good decisions. Relunctantly he acceded, although I still had more power than I was comfortable with. Nothing to do about it at the time because Onelist didn't have as good an admin permission list as it does now.

As the workload grew (which I didn't mind really, as I had plenty of time to spare that year), Dan decided to ask Cal to be another list admin. During this time traffic was heavy on the HLML, and although we didn't have to moderate anyone, we still had to warn people occassionally to calm down. Cal and Dan were good friends, which makes what happened quite tragic. I didn't know Cal that well, we had exchanged a few messages and she seemed to be a nice enough sort of person.

We happily went on for a couple of months. Dan and I had great plans for the list. We wanted to draw up a list Constitution so that everybody would know what was acceptable and what we as admins could do. (In part some of those ideas have been incorporated into the current list welcome message that I wrote a few months ago). We really wanted to involve Cal in this endeavour, since we wanted input from a different perspective. But she was always too busy and kept blowing off our ICQ meetings.

At the time it didn't bother me. Work was starting to heat up and the idea of trying to codify what Dan and I wanted was a daunting thought. In fact, even Dan stopped hearing from Cal for a week or two at a time, and he became worried that she wasn't taking her duties seriously. Actually, back then Dan was the public admin, as Cal and I hadn't been announced as list admins. I thought that was preferable as I could still be as talkative as always and it would also protect Cal's (and my) privacy.

It all came to a head in January of 1999. A discussion had escalated into quite a good flame war. I can say now that Dan and I should have caught it earlier, but it's hard to judge when people are just kidding around versus when they're trying to poke their eyes out. If people don't complain through official channels, then it's rather for us to try to impose our standards if no one else seems to mind.

(continued in the next journal)