According to Matthew Nuzum: > > > I guess the sort message is that I understand your complaint, but I > > > think the alternative is worse--manually pasting in a user's address > on > > > almost every message. > > > > Yeah, it gets a little tiresome hearing the same old ill-founded plea > > for mucking up a Reply-To header for the benefit of those who'd rather > > not think before replying. There are very good reasons for not > putting > > in this header, which have been discussed before. > > > > Maybe a brief message should be put in the footer of the email that > states how the list works. > > I subscribe to numerous lists and most use the alternative technique of > making the default reply-to the list. I'm not saying I like one or the > other, but a simple rule of usability is to make it clear.
Not a bad idea, although my experience has been that users are no more likely to look at the footer than the headers before posting a reply. > BTW, After I replied to the first message on the list, I realized why > the FAQ was careful to mention that authors get upset when people send > messages directly to them. However, I did not gather from that topic > that the default behavior of the reply button on mailing list messages > was to send directly to the original poster. Therefore it may warrant > an entry in the FAQ or on the page where the mailing list subscription > information is. Yes, it's certainly worth pointing out in the FAQ, if only to point out SourceForge's policy page and hopefully end some of the arguing about it. > > What gets me is that the simple logic of the way it's done now is lost > > on people. It's so intuitive: when you hit Reply, you reply to the > > sender, and when you hit Reply-to-all (or Group-reply) you reply to > the > > whole list. Why is this so difficult to grasp? > > ... All it takes is a second > > to ask yourself, before hitting Reply, "to whom do I want to send > this?" > > > > This type of phrase is a clear indication that your product (in this > case, the mailing list) violates some common usability rules. Usability > is not always based on logic, but on expectations. People expect A to > happen, but instead they get B. Therefore they complain. It doesn't > matter how logical it should be. The problem, though, is that users have inconsistent expectations, which the mailing list is essentially unable to meet. Lots of users have come to expect that replies to mailing lists somehow work differently than replies to other mail, because many (though certainly not all) lists set things up that way. If you're going to argue usability, then consistency should be part of the equation, and lists that munge the Reply-To break that consistency. Think about it: if you receive an e-mail addressed to you and a group of other people, but it didn't go through a list server (i.e. all addresses are in the headers), where would you expect a simple Reply, as opposed to a Reply-to-all, to go? The sender, of course. I'm not suggesting that users should stop and ask themselves a different question when replying to our list than when replying to private mail addressed to a group of people. What I'm saying is it's the very same question, requiring the very same two choices. If you're in the habit of hitting reply without always asking that same question, you're going to make a mistake sooner or later. So why do a lot of users have an expectation that a reply to a message from a list server should be different, and inconsistent with this behaviour - because they've been taught bad habits by lists that broke this consistency and altered their expectations. Does this mean that all lists must now follow suit and break consistency the same way, so that lists are consistently inconsistent with private group mail? I don't think so. The fact is not all users expect this behaviour from mailing lists. That's why you end up seeing, on munging lists, public replies that were meant to be private. Faced with these conflicting and inconsistent expectations, I think the choice that makes the most sense, from a usability perspective, is the one that is the most logical. > Asking for people to take an extra second to think about what they're > doing before they do it is unreasonable. :-) If people did that, the > world population would be much smaller, credit card debt would be much > lower, and no one would have bought a thigh-master. :-D No arguments here! The fact is, people act without thinking all the time, and make mistakes as a result. The job of a list administrator isn't to prevent such mistakes, which would be impossible, but to set things up so that the common mistakes have the least negative impact on the list. SourceForge has made that choice for us, so we don't have a lot of say in the matter, but their choice is one that Geoff and I agree with. -- Gilles R. Detillieux E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Spinal Cord Research Centre WWW: http://www.scrc.umanitoba.ca/ Dept. Physiology, U. of Manitoba Winnipeg, MB R3E 3J7 (Canada) _______________________________________________ htdig-general mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, send a message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with a subject of unsubscribe FAQ: http://htdig.sourceforge.net/FAQ.html
