I want to talk about this, because it has *really* been bugging me since
someone changed a bunch of lists to bounce non-member submissions.
Very often I get involved in discussions that are necessarily "cross"
discipline. For example, I recently offered to help out Roland with
some ARC work for a new CPU. Roland had appropriately CC'd
emerging-platforms-discuss at .
But my reply to him bounced. Because I'm not a member of that list.
And I don't *want* to be a member of that list.
Maybe this happens to me more because I'm an ARC member... so I get
involved in more cross-discipline discussions.
But I wonder how many other people are getting discouraged and as a
result don't participate or look elsewhere, because of these automatic
bounce configurations. Automatic bouncing sends a very clear signal to
new posters -- "you're not one of us, so we don't want to hear from
you". I don't *think* that's the message we want to send to folks.
After all, we're supposed to be *Open*Solaris, right?
I have the same problem with other lists as well -- I have to very
carefully remember which of my various e-mail addresses is used to make
sure that I don't get a bounce when replying to mail to
driver-discuss@, for example. (For the record, I've offered to help
moderate driver-discuss@, but nobody is responding, and I think nobody
is actively "owning" that list. The infrastructure folks have refused
to get involved, even though I'm one of the facilitators for the group
and a group leader for driver-discuss at .)
I therefore make this plea to facilitators and moderators: Please
moderate your lists properly. Allow non-member posting -- its not
automatically spam if someone posts to your group who doesn't frequent
the group.
Automatic bouncing is a crutch used by groups that don't want to be
bothered with moderation. Its not *that* hard to properly moderate
lists so that you don't need this crutch. It takes me about 5 minutes a
week to moderate opensound-discuss at . For a heavily trafficed/spam'd
list, it might be 5 minutes a day. (Properly use of white and black
lists, which you can set up in the mailman interface, can greatly help
with this.) If you're group is that busy, you can probably find more
than one volunteer to help moderate it -- further reducing the load on
any one individual.
Thank you.
- Garrett
