John Kaufmann wrote:
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?
This is when I think it would be reasonable, and there is already a list
manager that could potentially do it automatically, and a moderator who
has to choose to allow the post and could also provide the link. I agree
that the user would have to keep checking back to see if anything useful
has been said, but they could be told to do this, and they'd have the
link to make it easy. I think this is preferable to having the forced
subscription, because the volume of mail heere tends to dismay many
newbies and most of what they'd see would not be pertinent to their
specific question. The response that includes the link could say
something like, "To see any further discussion relative to your post,
keep checking this link (....); you will not automatically receive the
responses. If you would like to participate in other aspects of the
mailing list, like following other topics and perhaps responding to
questions from others as you become more familiar with OpenOffice.org,
please consider subscribing to the list by sending an e-mail to
[email protected]. Note that this list typically receives
20 to 40 posts each day, and it is recommended that you set your e-mail
client to send this traffic to a mailbox separate from your normal
mail." If the list manager did this, we wouldn't have to worry about
who's subscribed or not, and the list wouldn't have to see this
boilerplate at all. If the moderator did it, the list should be copied
so we'd know it had happened. Otherwise, one of us who has an easy way
to see if the user is subscribed, and can cite the link, could reply,
copying the list.
(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.
This sounds like an undesirable increase in overhead, and either too
much manual handling, or changes to the list management that have been
discussed many times here with no resolution. I've forwarded posts in
the past when they seem to have useful answers for the poster, but as
you have seen, some people object to this for various reasons. So the
compromise position seems to be a post calling the responder's attention
to the fact that the OP was not subscribed. Responders who are aware of
the situation generally copy the OP directly, but that's pretty easy to
forget, even if you know about it. Hence all sorts of additional list
traffic....
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
I'm really hoping the initial response above is a better solution! By
the way, the "CANCELLATION" post was atypical in that it came from an
account that was not itself subscribed, but apparently was getting the
e-mails via forwarding or some other means. Most of these are from
people who should probably never have subscribed in the first place, and
didn't really understand the consequences, but did not know any other
way to get responses. (And also didn't read the "Welcome" e-mail, but
that's another story....)
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