On Tue, 9 May 2006, Wayne Johnson wrote:

> I know, this is way off topic, but in the past there have been quite a 
> few TCLUGgers that were interested.  I only send this out once a year, 
> if you want future launch notices, you can subscribe to our mailing list 
> at http://www.tripolimn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tripolimn-announce


At U Missouri we developed a second list for our LUG so that members could 
send all sorts of off-topic message to that second list.  Of course, there 
are some annoyances with that scheme, like political and religious 
arguments cropping up, but we agreed to use [POLITICS] and [RELIGION] in 
the subject lines so that people who wanted to avoid those topics could 
stay on the off-topic list without being bothered with those things.

The off-topic list was a huge success because it gave people a great place 
to talk about all sorts of things that were of interest to other LUG 
members.  Examples would be questions/answers about places to buy various 
non-Linux things around town, or how to do something in Windows (we kept 
the LUG Linux-specific).  There was absolutely no restriction on use of 
the off-topic list except that Linux discussions did not belong there.

The other great thing about this is if you don't like the idea of an 
off-topic, general-purpose list, just don't sign up for it.  This will 
work for you because it helps to keep the LUG list on topic.

We called the two lists "membership" and "discussion" but we could name 
them anything we wanted here.

What do you think?

Mike