2009/4/5 Cristian Secară <or...@secarica.ro>: > On Sun, 5 Apr 2009 16:32:25 +0930, David Gowers wrote: > >> Yes. If you want to be respectful of the people posting here, to this >> mailing list (gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu) , then please stop >> using the 'forum' interface on gimpusers.com and instead, genuinely >> subscribe to this mailing list. > > If so, then what is the purpose of the "forum" ? Who has interest that > some people can (tehnically) be non-respectful of the people posting > here ? (why is not the "forum" simply erased then ?)
You seem to have the idea that the forum was created by some of the same people who maintain this mailing list. This is very far from the truth -- Some random person, who has hardly posted at all on this mailing list, just said one day "I've set up forums on gimpusers.com that provide an interface to the GIMP mailing lists, hope you like, tell me what you think". A few of the core GIMP developers objected quite strongly, and later indicated that the best thing would be to take it down altogether. Their objections were ignored. The purpose of the forum, I cannot directly comment on; although I'd guess that it aimed to make posting easier. It achieved that, at the cost of the confusion and inconvenience of both the forum users and the people genuinely subscribed to this mailing list. If anyone only wanted to read the gimp-user mailing list, the GMANE archives would be perfectly adequate (with the advantage that they represent the emails as.. emails rather than forum threads/posts ; proper threading et al) One problem that I haven't even mentioned yet is people thinking the mailing list is a message board. This might seem unproblematic, but there are significant difference in etiquette between message boards and mailing lists, and the functional differences between the gimpusers.com forums and this mailing list have already caused problems in this area. Overall, the forum simply causes more problems than it solves. Whose interest it is in (this is not a technical issue, this is a matter of misrepresentation and confusion effecting readers and posters accessing this list both in the approved way and through the forums) -- I hope that is evident from earlier parts of this email. Re: the reply-to issue: I have to agree, this has occasionally bit me. OTOH, what exactly do you expect your mailer to do when you choose 'reply' rather than 'reply to all'? It seems to me sensible that 'reply' should reply to the original author, rather than all people who saw the mail -- that's what 'reply to all' is for, right? If this distinction does not exist for many of the mailing lists you subscribe to, I have to say that this is an inconsistency in the opposite direction. David _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
