On 26 Aug 2005 at 15:13, dhbailey wrote:

> Lighten up on Henry.  Maybe he is doing his "job" just the way he sees
> it should be done, and perhaps you and Darcy are just on the wrong
> list.
> 
> If you want a list moderator who looks at every message and approves
> it before it is posted so you don't have to hit the delete key,

When you're happy to reduce it to the most absurd alternatives, this 
is the kind of answer you come up with.

Proper management of an *unmoderated* list (which this is) involves 
unsubscribing users who are polluting the list, and changing list 
settings sensibly. 

Henry is doing neither of these things in the last month or so, and 
this makes the list less easy to use. If rectifying these two 
problems were in some way difficult, there'd be no grounds for 
complaints, but both problems can be quite easily fixed with about 5 
minutes of the list owner's time.

Registering dissatisfaction with that neglect of responsibility does 
not imply that one would prefer a moderated list -- it's 
intellectually dishonest to even introduce that as a response to the 
complaints about what looks like dereliction of duty to many of us.

Furtunately, I am not bothered to any significant degree by either of 
the problems. My email client makes it extremely easy for me to 
selectively reply to any one or any arbitrary combination of 
addresses in the header of the list posting I'm replying to, so I 
have no problem with the bad Reply-To. I also don't see much problem 
with the 2 or 3 autoresponses per day from the moron who went on 
vacation (I don't find autoresponders useful for real people -- if 
someone's not there, I don't need a response to every message I send 
to them telling me so; a smart autoresponder would only send one such 
message to each address, but there doesn't seem to be such a thing), 
as he's on Digest. But if he were subscribed to the whole list, it 
would be a *very* bad problem.

So, in this case, the damage from Henry's neglect is minimal (though 
the Reply-To is pretty inconvenient for those with email clients that 
don't make it easy to pick which addresses you want to reply to), but 
it is, nonetheless, still neglect of his responsibilities.

It's pretty consistent with past history, though, as it took months 
for Henry to "fix" the original Reply-To behavior (which we are now 
back to) after the list migrated to Mailman. I complained about that 
back then and was roundly condemned for it. It's nice to see now that 
I'm not the only one who thinks things are not being terribly well-
managed.

-- 
David W. Fenton                        http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates                http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc

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