In a message dated 2009.11.01 11:11 -0500, Barbara Duprey wrote:
Just a thought -- there is a link that can be provided into the archives
for a particular thread. What if either (in order of preference) the
list manager, a moderator, or anybody on the list who knows how, sent a
message to the unsubscribed poster containing that link? The poster
would not have to subscribe (thereby getting what could potentially be a
dismaying number of messages -- and often leading to a "please
unsubscribe me" message). Yet they'd be able to follow the discussion,
wouldn't they, to see any responses on the thread?
Barbara, thanks for that reminder of why users are allowed to post
without subscribing - presumably someone has made the judgment that it
is more friendly to new users, in a paradigm that says a mailing list
must choose between:
(1) subscribing to post, subjecting a new user to many more emails than
those which address his question;
(2) posting without subscribing, which means the new user may not see
the answer to his question.
Most lists choose (1). This list chooses (2), and your elegant
suggestion tries to compensate for that well-intended but troublesome
(and possibly misguided) policy. But how and when would that be done? -
(a) Immediately when an unsubscribed user posts a question, in reply to
the original post? If so, how would the user know when the thread has
received a new post, including possibly an answer?
(b) Each time something is posted in that thread? If we can do that,
why not just (or also) forward the post?
That latter alternative (b) seems to require a mechanism to keep track
of posts by unsubscribed users and, when a post comes to the list, not
only forward it to the subscribed list, but also check it against
another list of unsubscribed posts for special handling. That sent me
to the ezmlm manual <http://www.ezmlm.org/manual/> to see what is
possible within the package without extension. I did not find a good
handle on this, but there are lots of people who know much more about
both ezmlm and database programming, so maybe it's easier than I suppose.
I would love to see a solution to this problem, because it would
probably also go far toward alleviating the other problem that takes up
far too much of the list bandwidth: Unsubscribing, or as called most
recently, "CANCELLATION". The irony is that a list policy that may be
designed to avoid burdening new users with lots of irrelevant (to them)
emails has the effect of burdening the whole list with lots of
irrelevant (to everyone) emails. There has to be a better way.
John
--
BTW, that search for an ezmlm solution was not without reward: It led to
Untroubled Software <http://untroubled.org/>, home of ezmlm-browse and
one of the treasures of the web.
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