Hi, Foster, Dawn M wrote: > Actually, cross-posting is strongly discouraged in the MeeGo mailing > list guidleines. You can see our guidelines for more details: > http://wiki.meego.com/Mailing_list_guidelines
In some cases (for example, when replying to a cross-posted email) it is appropriate to cross-post (assuming the subject is relevant to both lists). It is also appropriate when including people who are not subscribed to a list, but for whom the discussion is relevant. One example might be CCing meego-qa when we're talking about tidying up the Quality section of the wiki - even though that discussion might start on meego-community. If you think of email as a big conversation, then it makes sense to include new people, or even groups of people, in the conversation while it's underway, even if they didn't see the start. Yes, cross posting should be used with moderation - there is a cost to mailing lots & lots of people (but Mailman will ensure they don't receive the email several times across different lists). But I think that there's a strong argument for not banning cross-posting 100%. >> What do you think? > > I gave this quite a bit of thought, and I think it's fair to make the person > sending the message decide whether they really want to send it to the list. > This puts the decision on the user - by signing up, they are taking the > responsibility for understanding what they signed up for. The problem is that it also puts a moderate burden on the user - signing up to a mailman list, waiting for the token, confirming your subscription and resending your message all takes a few minutes. Not long in the greater scheme of things, but if your goal is just to inform people of something relevant to them, maybe you won't pay that price, and the information will be lost. This also doesn't solve the "I have multiple email addresses" problem - you sign up with 3 email addresses to one list, set two of them to not receive email, and then you have to remember to redo the same thing every time you sign up to a new list. A post-only list *does* solve this problem, as does effective list moderation. > Moderation also has some problems because the moderator > is taking the responsibilty for deciding what the user meant to do. The way > we have it set up now, we're putting the decision in the users' hands, which > seems fair to me. It's impossible to protect people from themselves. Some people will sign up to the list, and 6 months later will accidentally send something confidential to the list - but they're members so it goes straight through. Oops! A post-only list requires an explicit action to join a mailing list (satisfying your barrier to shooting yourself in the foot). The only way that we could possibly protect everyone from posting confidential stuff to the lists would be a 2 step posting: 1. I email the list. 2. I get an email saying "Careful, you emailed the list. Are you sure?" 3. I confirm that yes, I really wanted my email to go to the list. and that would be annoying :) Cheers, Dave. -- maemo.org docsmaster Email: [email protected] Jabber: [email protected] _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
