I am going to present this in as much of an objective manner as possible.
Enggenius is a community Yahoo! Group for the Mumbai University affiliated engineering college students. And from humble beginnings, it has risen to great heights, and a quick glance to any of the group postings will rub that in.
A good initiative, the whole concept of bringing people together, sharing doubts, declaring time tables before officially out, and the whole she-bang…
I was a moderator to the group, and it’s Electrical, Electronics and Instrumentation arm, the Enggenius-Elite group. And due to a freak moderation, the mail which can be read below, was not-so-graceful-but-fine-by-me manner thrown out.
My take being, that the group has to put in milder terms, not completely succeeded in many places, some pointers being: The number of actual support mails to the number of “how-enggenius-is-big”, and “how-great-we-have-become” (i.e. the mails from members to the mails from Team Enggenius) is not quite the way I feel it should be. Plus the high-handedness, non-willingness to discuss (or just plain non discussion) of group policies with the moderators are some of the others.
Here an incident is quote worthy, but may not be completely true as reported, since I have heard only one version of the story… There is this friend of mine, Abhijeet Maharana, quite a long time back posted a tutorial on Graphics in C. In the end, he added a small one-liner or something about the moderators / group owners, which apparently could not be digested then, and so the tutorial was modified. Now, Abhijeet noticed the modification, and took this issue with the owners then, leading to quite a huff and a puff as now, with Abhijeet leaving the group. This, by the way, did not harm him, in any manner. He is quite successful where he is, now. If at all, it is Enggenius’s loss, which sadly they shall probably not see…
This attitude has been existing since the group began, and I was quite neutral to it then, since it did not affect me in any manner, whatsoever. I was more of a mute spectator, so to say. I was made moderator then, and though I did not directly raise any voice about the above misgivings, I always had them at the back of my mind.
So it happened now. There is a tradition of sorts at Enggenius to post mailers about how Enggenius is big, call for new memberships, previous achievements, et al, at the start of every semester. A good tradition, except that the mailers often have no end. And they are mailed to every group, so if you are a member of say three of Enggenius’s groups, you would get three copies of the same. Which is fine for people who have enabled the digest option, or so Deepesh says. I have always found these mailers irksome, but was okay with them, since it was Enggenius’s way of publicity and marketing.
One of the this semester’s mailers included this:
This is not a mail to inform you that the file section of your group contains the syllabus for the coming semester.
Nor are we going to tell you that the programs for your coming semester are loaded there.
And we will certainly not tell you that software ( such as MASM/ TASM) is loaded in the file section.
And this is not a reminder to tell you that we are the FIRST to declare term dates and exam dates semester after semester.
We write in today simply to wish you a great semester ahead!
Then came along Chirag, who mailed in this: this mail is not to inform you that u have used this method of giving information about enggenius a lot of times.
this mail is not to inform you that it was good the first time and u’d rather be direct.
this mail is about saying that you should not delete this mail during moderation.
I found this take quite amusing, and a good one to voice against the first mail. So, I approved it. And broke the “code” of Enggenius moderators, by approving a post that showed Enggnius in a not so good light. Which led to Deepesh downgrading my member status from a moderator to a member. Fine by me, cause I still stand by that message, it is amusing, tongue-in-cheek even, and I do not see how it harms Enggenius as such. It’s criticism, and I feel that Enggenius can take it. They don’t think so. Their choice.
By the way, I completely believe that on reading this, I may be thrown out of Enggenius altogether, but then again, not my loss. They loose a member, while I can still join in with a different id, or ask a friend to forward mails to me.
Believe me, I hold no grudges against anyone, it was nice the way it was, and whatever happened has happened, it’s just that I feel a little sad at the way Enggenius has been treating people (there are other examples here, but let’s not go into that now), and that in the end it will be a loss for the group, as such.
Best of luck, Enggenius, best of luck, me. I already am giving you free publicity here, linking your pages and stuff!
Flames, words of encouragement, and other blah welcome.
