I love running mailing lists

Those who know me know who I work for and what I do for a living. I have a fairly strict rule that I don’t write about it. That’s because I’m not management, I don’t speak for the company, and it’s not generally my place to offer opinions in public about it or about the industry. (I will say that it is a great place to work and the people there are top-notch.) That being said:
I had to write a chiding note to one of the lists I run today due to rampant off-topic postings. I’ve always found it interesting that when I allow a list to run through benign neglect (usually because it’s a list that was “orphaned” and the company I work for was kind enough to migrate it to one of our commercial list hosting servers, and I don’t really have either the time or the inclination to read every post), certain people start to arrogate authority unto themselves and start acting like they are God on earth to the rest of the list members. What I find particularly intriguing is that they do this without any real ability to prevent other members from posting, but because of the tone they adopt or the aura of knowledge about the subject they have, they still tend to be able to stifle those who are less knowledgeable or not quite as bold. And the list becomes irrelevant as people start to crack wise and post jokes and have entire days designated like “OT Fridays”.
So it always makes me smile a bit when I have to come down out of the heavens and proclaim the Iron Law of Topic Relevance…because I do have the ability to stop people from posting, and moreover I have the ability to shut the list down cold.
But it’s days like this when I really despise the Internet. “People clad in brief authority” doesn’t just apply to Masonry. It applies throughout human endeavor.