Greetings,
personally, I have been for years against allowing unsubscribed users
to post to this or any other OpenOffice mailing list, giving plenty of
reasons all documented in the archives. I also pointed out time and
again how, er, shall we say "suboptimal and inefficient" the practice
of "reposting to the whole list AND the unsubscribed OP a message all
subscribed users had already downloaded" actually is.
All this is another story, however, really. I have no intention to ask
again that unsubscribed users are not allowed to post, as I have to
admit OOo lists are a bit unique from this point of view.
The reasons why I writing today is to point out that OK, it is
necessary to allow unsubscribed users to post after moderation, but:
1) it is really, really inefficient to let pass tenths of message with
highly informative subjects like:
[users] [moderated]
[users] [moderated] YOU MUST GIVE A SUMMARY HERE
2) it is MUCH worse when volunteers _answer_ such messages without
changing the subject to indicate what the actual content is, ie
making it much more visible both to other subscribers and in
archive searches.
Moderator(s): may I ask you to *reject* from now on all messages
without a decent subject, explaining with a standard template to the
unsubscribed posters that they are much, much more likely to get help
quick if they bother to spend ten more seconds in that way? You are
making a disservice to these people letting things as they are.
Does it really make sense, for a volunteer, at least, to open 20
subject-less messages in the hope that at least one of those message
contains a question for which that volunteer knows the answer?
Personally, these days I am opening every tenth of these messages or
so, deleting right away all the others, and I'll bet that many other
subscribed users do the same. I do invite all subscribed users to
delete without reading all such messages from now on, to make the list
more helpful to unsubscribed users.
Other subscribed volunteers: if you really, really feel this vocation
to spend a few hours every week playing the "moderated message
lottery", that is spending 20 minutes every time to find that one
message which you could have answered in 30 seconds, had it had an
informative message, that's your time, OK. But if you do NOT change
that message to something from which all subscribed and unsubscribed
users can learn and find useful information quickly you, too, are
doing the community a DISSERVICE. Please stop.
Sure, I have read many times for years the argument that "you can't
expect that a total computer novice with only one question knows what
a mailing list is, how to subscribe and unsubscribe, isn't scared or
pissed off by the large traffic here, etc...". I can accept that, but
this is something else. OK, never mind enforcing subscription.
But if you just enforce ("how" is a different topic, let's acknowledge
it's badly needed in the first place) the rule "NO DECENT SUBJECT, NO
HELP", that is, if you ask unsubscribed users to spend 10 seconds more
once every question they have, without being flooded with list
traffic, it's like multiplying by ten or more the number of volunteers
who PROVIDE THAT HELP. Because you make much faster for ALL OF THEM to
FIND where they can ACTUALLY help.
Marco
(who feels that a list like this IS essential to the
success of OOo and FOSS, but also feels again a
strong, pressing urge to tell everybody willing to
spend time on volunteer FOSS support to do it anywhere
else but here)
--
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you: http://digifreedom.net/node/84
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