From: Cheryl _ avonsgirl@yahoo.com.au
I like Blake's 7 - I thought I'd like to talk to other Blake seven fans about the show, so I decided to join a mailing list. When I first posted and said hello to you all, and received no response (although, I will add, I have since been welcomed by one person)I didn't think of you all as rude(although if I'd walked into a room full of you people and the same situation occurred, I most definitely would have).
Be assured that you are not being ignored. I at least am reading your posts, and I'd be very surprised if everyone else wasn't. You're just unfortunate in joining the Lyst at a very busy time, since we're embroiled in deep discussion about fanfic, relative importance of characters, nature of fannishness etc - all subjects guaranteed to hog attention from everything else.
Take the walking into a room analogy (I think a pub would be more appropriate, though that might just be my take on it). Here's a group of people all sitting round a table, they all 'know' each other, and they're all deep in discussion on subjects that they not only know a lot about but care about a lot. Then someone new turns up, a complete stranger, drink in hand, and she finds herself a seat on the corner. Well, that has happened to me quite a few times, and I wasn't surprised to find myself more or less out of the conversation. It's the way things happen. It's not unfriendly, it's not a deliberate snub (though, yes, it can feel like one), it's just that groups of like-minded people, even virtual ones, have a habit of forming cliques that can be hard to penetrate.
On the other hand, you do have a point. We have been a bit discourteous this time. Normally when new arrivals appear they do get a few welcome messages, but then we're not normally so distracted. So may I at least say, Welcome to the Lyst, Cheryl.
(I suggest that rather than try and shout over the crowd, wait until the Lyst gets a bit quieter and settles down to something more like normal, ie about half the volume of posts it's currently generating. You'll then be in a better position to approach us one to one rather than struggle to pitch into the fray.)
I have wasted precious time, giving you all the benefit of the doubt, by posting enough posts, to be sure I actually was being ignored - although, again this was rather obvious, as a couple of points I made in a couple of posts, were later, also stated by someone else - which means that either, they read my posts (agreed with that point at least) but did not wish to directly respond to me *OR* they had similar thoughts but did not know about mine, simply because they couldn't be bothered reading my posts - amounts to the same thing.
It happens, I'm afraid. When two people say much the same thing, and one is a newcomer and the other a long-established member of the clique, then respondees will tend to answer the latter. We don't get the posts as they are posted, or at least I don't, I get them in chunks of 20-30 at a time. So if you're point is somewhere in those 20-30, and someone else makes pretty much the same point in the same chunk, I'm more likely to answer that someone else who has participated in the thread from the beginning. And when the Lyst is this busy, I really do have to prioritise. I know I've sent up to a dozen posts at a time (partly in an attempt to beat Fiona to the prize of Most Posts In a Day, and just after I mailed them off she sent in another one, bastard anthropologist that she is:)), but they have taken up virtually every minute I can spare before or after work (yes, I'm a saddo Lyst junkie, I don't deny it).
I've just resorted my inbox to make a quick count - you have posted 5 times this month prior to this (not entirely unjustified) complaint, compared with me (98 posts), Dana (69), Tavia (44), Sally (68), Helen (66) and Fiona (70 - grud on a greenie, I beat her!), to name just some of the more vociferous posters this month. Can you see how you might be getting drowned out in the babble!
You're also up against some of the most informed, quite possibly opinionated and in my case at least arrogant members of the Lyst who are too busy bludgeoning the opposition with the intellectual weight of their carefully honed arguments to stop to say hello to a new face:) (Actually, any bludgeoning might exist only in my imagination, but it certainly has been a very challenging - and enjoyably so - month for my brain.)
So yes, you have been noticed, but yes, we have been less welcoming than we might have been, or ought to have been. And no, it wasn't anything you said.
Stick around, we'll wear ourselves out eventually.
Neil
You could have told me to bugger off - I wouldn't have liked it(who would?) but because I don't know any of you, you don't actually matter to me - so I would have been able to take it...At least it would have been honest. You people are exceptionally rude.
Cheryl. (Who freely admits to herself, that she is possibly wasting her time, yet again, if no-one is actually reading her posts) *Chuckle*
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