Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes: > I think that such a list would provide an opportunity for discussions > to move out of -private, which is of course an even bigger barrier to > participation.
I believe threads stay in -private long past the point of requiring privacy, not because people are particularly enamored of the audience or posting restrictions there, but because discussion threads almost never move. People always tried to move threads in Usenet as well, and I'd say it works about 5% of the time. People almost always just keep replying in whatever forum they saw the original in. This isn't a problem specific to Debian. I see this all the time at work too. The only thing that can sort of help is if *everyone* in the discussion is using something like Gmail that doesn't do proper threading and instead shows every discussion as a linear discussion, and everyone does reply-to-all to the last message of the discussion, at which point you can mess with the recipients and sometimes it will stick. But with any diversity of mail clients or proper threading, this goes away. And the threads start in -private due, usually, to legitimate privacy issues. I've rarely seen threads *start* in -private for no apparent reason. Rather, thread drift happens (which is pretty much a constant), and the thread never moves (which is pretty much a constant). I'm extremely sympathetic to the problem you're trying to solve, but I think it's a fairly fundamental UI issue in how email works, and I'm dubious that creating another list will help much. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>