Greetings, It came to my attention, after a new hcoop member's post was held for approval to hcoop-discuss, that we have not been adding people by default to these lists for ... oh, the last *six years*. Which probably explains their pitifully low participation rate, especially since it seems nowadays folks don't like clicking around our beloved portal to find the "Preferences" page... (hell, even I had to sit there for a minute to remember where you set list prefs).
I vaguely recall there may have been a reason... a few folks complaining about list traffic? But checking the subscriber list, it looks like almost none of our members from the last few years have bothered subscribing to any of the optional lists! So, my current thinking is that we should instead subscribe everyone by default to -discuss and -help, leaving a note in https://wiki.hcoop.net/MemberManual/GettingStarted/AccountCreated about *un*subscribing after signing up if the member cares, rather than subscribing... something about the relative worth of forgiveness and permission. I like it for another reason -- any new member that complains about receiving unwanted list traffic can be easily diverted back to AccountCreated, whereas the new member who didn't suffer reading our lengthy introductory material and now suffers in silence cannot. Also something or other about community building or whatever the hep cats call it. Another, possibly friendlier option: we can also just *invite* new members to join the discussion and help lists, leaving them free to take no action and also receive no mail while still making them aware the lists exist. The major downside I see is that the invite is not very descriptive -- the subject is "confirm $hash" where hash is a very long hex string, and a test send to gmail ended up in their "special offers" folder that they are using to spam gmail users now... (on the bright side, it looks like they don't flag our announcements and whatnot as spam any more! Go SPF records!) so, I think there's a big chance it would be ignored. Forced subscription also sends out a notification, so ... Thoughts? I think it is a big enough change that I hope at least someone has thoughts that disagree with mine (given that I sort-of disagree with even myself, already)! Or agrees, whatever. Just as long as I am not making decisions like this in an echo-chamber (I hear we're democratically organized). If I see no serious opposition I am leaning toward going forward with subscribing new members whenever we have our next member sign up, and also sending a message to -announce reminding everyone to check their list subscriptions because they could be missing out. -- "Karen loved animals. Unfortunately the cheetahs betrayed her trust," Libot said.
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