I've been around this circuit before, as have some of you. I've taken
the tour of the site which supposedly reveals the wisdom of the Reply-To
pointing to the sender. I am singularly unconvinced.
A general discussion group is a garden party, and you would not have
your default response to a speaker in such a setting jimmied so that
any reply required one to pull the speaker off into a corner of the lot
so nobody else might overhear. You are entitled to respond, in a free
and open assembly, in the same manner and with the same volume as the
original declaration which provoked your reaction, and that should be
the default. I suspect the listowner who insists all replies go
privately to the individual writer is more concerned with the yardwork
involved with the list than the subject at hand. It is much easier if
only the comments of those who had been there long enough to know to hit
the `reply all' feature (or indeed those with the diligence to learn any
feature which was not the most automatic) would be presented in a
setting with heavy traffic.
For other than the discussion forums, mileage varies. NerdNosh is
actually a daily 'zine, so there are essentially no replies at all, and
someone who cannot learn that pretty quickly usually has not much to
contribute anyway. (The reply-to in my case points to the listowner;
this avoids the need to pick the odd `hey d00d where do i send
stories?'s out of the hopper.)
This, too. Any formula which sends a writer two copies of any and
every reply is broke.
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Tim Bowden)
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