2009/3/23 Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay <[email protected]>: > On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Debayan Banerjee <[email protected]> wrote: > > Let's start with a basic question (more pertinent since you also have > a LUG at your institution). > > [0] Do you believe and agree with the statement that the communication > skills especially those pertaining to doing virtual communications > require improvement ? Yes. > >> 1) Rules exist for humans. If *a lot* of people are not comfortable >> with the rules, the rules should change, not the human. > > If you have a list of mails from folks who are uncomfortable with the > no HTML mail policy, I'd request that you forward the names to the > ListAdmin concerned. Its been a day since I had posed this question to the list. I have already received a mail from someone on this list voicing his support on the matter and a tweet from one Arjun Pakarshi. Why he did not send it to the mailing list? Here is a part of his mail:
" Hi Debayan, Hope you are doing great! Thanks for initiating the discussion on HTML-formatted mail in the list. Just before your lug-calendar mail - I had sent a mail to the list from my gmail id, and it resulted in a bounce followed by Idg's warning. Now, there seems to some problem in my understanding on how gmail does this. Just above the text_area where we put in the body of the mail - is the WYSIWYG editor options which can be turned off when you select Plain text. I chose this setting just after I made this google account - and I have been under the assumption of all my mails have been devoid of (malicious) html, which is clearly not the case. What other changes did you make, to sanitize outgoings from gmail? I think there must be good reason that people prefer using programs that _still_ don't have the capability of rendering html, but since we have particularly mentioned pine - the release note of Pine 4.0 says - "Basic rendering of message bodies in HTML format"... Sorry for blabbering so much on this ... actually I have been hit twice, and worried. " I have still asked him to forward it to the mailing list himself. You ask for a list of mails from people voicing support. I went through the ilug-cal mailing list archives. There hasnt been more than 20 mails per month for the last 4 months. You think this is fine? strange. Among the people who have sent mails to this list include yourself, Indranil da and Debarshi. No one else posted too many mails here. Reason? This HTML rule. So my point is that very few people actually respond to any mails here and that is not because they are sleepy or dont care but because of this rule. > > Traditionally, HTML mails have caused a lot of misery for folks who > use various means to read list mails. For example, think of console > based MUAs or, folks who access the list via limited ability devices. Ya and those are special cases. Ofcourse we need to see what the majority of the people reading mails use and frame rules accordingly. An HTML extension scrubber like ironport would serve everyone well. > >> 2) I dont agree that this list exists only for people who have >> "something very important to say" so I dont expect someone to move >> heaven and earth to ask why he should use Fedora instead of opensuse. > > Yes, till the time you believe in that you risk having a list that is: > > - close to GLUG-BOM in vacuum content and stale discussion (with due > apologies to the once-fine list) Well its still better than a list that only has a job vacancy once in a while and a few useful links from one single person from time to time. > > Real life isn't too different from what you do online. So, if in real > life, you don't want to chase an issue down to earth, probably it > isn't enough important to you. Face it. That's why we become nags on > specific issues. I dont agree. > Unless the itch that you have is making your life a living hell, > probably you don't have an itch at all. Thats taking it a little too far. We are talking about sending mails to a list, not getting selected in the Indian cricket team. > >> 3) As people who take decisions on this list it is the list admins >> duty to make sure that transferring ideas from ones brains to a list >> is made as easy as possible. Let the person move heaven and earth in >> making that particular idea better instead of fighting bouncing mails >> because of mime type extensions. > > Sure, a way to fix that is to send out during the initial subscription > mail and, the monthly reminders the need to use text-only mails. > Expecting folks to read that isn't really expecting too much is it. You could expect lot of things, but the fact of the matter is that people dont read it. And what do you do if they dont? Keep expecting or change the one single rule that has led to absolutely no discussion on this list in the past n months. > >> 4) This is my last post on this topic. I have made all my points. The >> rest is upto the list admins. > > Hmm... 'last word' is a pretty facile line of argument. I under estimated myself earlier. I have more arguments infact. All I say is mails/discussions in this list increase by a factor of 10 if you remove this policy. So many other lists allow HTML for a reason. I would have supported bouncing off HTML mails if this were the kernel-devel list or some elite hacker list where people are already into the culture from a long time participate. Clearly, this is not such a list. One look at the archives clearly tells me that this list has had no discussion at all in the past 4 months. I cant see how that is good in anyway. And you asking me for a list of mails in support is too much to ask right now, but I can amass it in a few days if you so demand. > > -- -- Be Intelligent, Use GNU/Linux http://debayanin.googlepages.com/ http://debayan.wordpress.com http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in _______________________________________________ Ilug-cal-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://list.ilug-cal.org/mailman/listinfo/ilug-cal-discuss
