On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 09:47:03PM +1100, Troy Rollo wrote:
At 04:20 29/03/03 -0500, Kee Hinckley wrote:
Sorry. I don't buy it. When you sign up for the list, you sign up for
conversations with people on the list.
This is manifestly false. You sign up for list traffic. There is nothing
whatever to require you to accept mail from any particular individual on
the list.
While I would agree that there is nothing that inherently bounds a list
to this policy, I believe that the default policy for most lists is that
people can reply privately to postings to the list, and I certainly only
want to particpate in lists which use such a policy.
If you place impediments in replying directly to a list posting, you push
people into sending their messages to the entire audience, even when they
are not meant for the entire audience. This pointlessly increases the
volume of mail on the list to the detriment of all, increases flamewars,
and is generally a terrible idea.
USENET was actually revolutionary in the days of BBSs in that you could reply
to a poster by E-mail and were in fact encouraged to do so. In the early
days it was not at all uncommon to get many more e-mail replies to a posting
than followups. "Reply to the poster and she'll summarize for the net" was
a standard mantra when global posting was expensive and e-mail of course
much cheaper in terms of total traffic to the uucp net.
This is one of the things spam destroyed. People now are afraid to put their
real e-mail in their postings. Sometimes there is none, sometimes you can find
it if you dig around in the posting to see it written in a form you must
rewrite. It sucks, and spam has done this to us.
Let it not do it to this list. I would hope this list would make a policy that
if you are not willing to quickly and easily take e-mail replies to your
postings on this list, you should not post to the list. You are free to
read it.
An easy challenge/response to new replyers is fine, but much more than that
seems inappropriate. (I don't know the particulars as I haven't mailed
Mr. Rollo before. I am about to find out...)
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