[rescue] wrong list?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> It's just that you are kind of out here on your lonesome w.r.t. this
> reply-to stuff.

I'm going to speak up and say that I agree with Bill on this point.  These
lists are for -discussion-.  If you want a no-discussion, Q&A list for Sun
stuff, go join sun-managers.  I sat on that list for about a month before
I got bored out of my skull with the same stupid questions being asked
over and over.

There is no community there.  It's sterile of interaction, and it's purely
functional, as it was intended.  From what I've seen/heard, this list
has a very different purpose.

> Very few lists I know of do that any more, for the very reasons that
> are being complained about.

If people are consistently not capable of operating the "reply" feature
of their MUA[1], there exists significant question as to whether those
people will feel comfortable in a largely-technical mailing list, anyway.

I'll paraphrase Dennis Ritchie here and say that if you want lists with
"Reply-to" set your way, you know where to find them.

> A managed community does need some kind of mechanism to keep it from
> straying away from what makes it a community in the first place.

We have one: individual maturity.  Time and time again do people take
discussions from rescue@ to geeks@ because it belongs there.  If it gets
out of hand, either Bill or Amy will usually suggest moving the thread
there.

Before ranting about whether or not there should exist a mechanism to
keep things in-line, we need to ask ourselves if things are out-of-line
to begin with.

> Traditionally in mailing list forums this has been peer pressure and/or
> forced manual moderation.  It doesn't seem peer pressure works very well
> on this list (even when it's you applying the pressure), and IIRC you've
> said before that manual moderation isn't in the cards for this list....

I'm not disappointed in the quality of this list.  I think the peer
moderation is working just fine.  This isn't the Monastery.  This isn't
an ISO foo working-group discussion list.  But, on the other hand, it
isn't Slashdot, either.

> (of course all the other lists I'm on suffer from the "reply-all"
> syndrome, though personally I deal with that by setting the reply-to as
> appropriate myself and I usually only get "burned" when I try to suggest
> all followups to my post should be private but not everyone plays along....)

And this is a problem?

--Jonathan
[1] I use PINE.  If "Reply-to" is set, and it's not equal to "From", it
    prompts me for which I wish to send the reply to.  Most other MUAs
    have similar functionality, even if it's implemented differently.