On Mon, 27 Oct 1997 14:13:57 -0600 (CST), dattier(_at_)wwa(_dot_)com
(David W. Tamkin) wrote:
| Okay, let me rephrase that: You are not addressing the needs and
| preferences of the rest of the list readers.
For one thing, this thread so far has been about the needs and
preferences of the person who asked the question. Trying to make
I was responding to Alan's message, which touched upon this tiresome
thread you mention, but which also had a gripe about the S/N level in
general on this list. Perhaps the problem is that we are discussing
different things.
| The idea here is to tell the +rest+ of the list that this is posted
| not because it is of genuine interest to anyone interested in
So the only exceptions are those posts guaranteed to be of
significance to every single list member? That would be
administrative messages from the maintainer and announcements of
new releases. All other posts would need to be tagged.
No, it's up to your judgement. If you think all your messages are of
the less interesting kind, you'd be free to tag them accordingly.
Other forms of sabotage to make this not work as intended are
certainly conceivable.
A different but related idea would be to set up "channels" on the
list. I've only seen this on the very early Linux list that was before
the alt.os.linux.* groups (or whatever they were called) were formed;
it must have been 1992 or so, and the list must have received hundreds
if not thousands of messages per +day+.
I don't know what software they ran to do that channels thing, or if
it is already a feature of SmartList; if it's not, then adding this
sort of functionality to the SmartList package would be an interesting
project (and finally something to bring this thread on-topic).
In this model, the list newbies would post to the "open" or "none"
channel, and if a discussion turned out to be interesting, you'd
promote it to one of the other channels (while it would still be
visible to the "none" subscribers). Stuff about how to properly set up
Reply-to:s could safely be moved to a "flames" channel, which would
also be visible to everyone, but easily filterable by virtue of an
"X-Channel:" header or something, regardless of who participates, what
Subject they use, and whom they Cc:. Ideally, each subscriber could
set up filtering of channels already at the server.
If you're brave or too busy, you'd filter out the "none" channel;
this would hopefully produce a low-volume edition with very high
information content (provided you also opted out of the "flames" and
"periodic FAQ reminder" channels etc)
It can be detected as things are now without making posters add
subject tags! If you don't want to see such posts, and a message
arrives through the list (as indicated by From_ or (Resent-)Sender:
or X-Mailing-List:, not merely by To:), and it has any non-empty
Cc: on it, filter it out. That will take care of anything sent
anywhere else and carboned to the list and of anything sent to the
You could do this, but it is not the same as having the messages
better classified for filtering purposes in the first place. If you,
for instance, are interested in this thread, but not in "how do I do
things Sendmail does better" threads, you don't presently have a good
way to do this sort of filtering automatically.
/* era */
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