On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 01:33:10AM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote: > The bare fact is, that reply-to munging flamewar threads have > occured on mailing lists since the first days that reply-to > munging started happening. I must have been on at least 200 if > not 500 mailing lists which have had this exact same flamewar, > and not just once, but several times a year/month, and it creeps > back up again occasionally. Not just on lists like this one > which set Reply-to to the list, but also on lists that *dont*, > where people are arguing that the list *should*.
I see the former all the time, as to you. I've only ever seen the latter, maybe twice in 15 years. I'd actually be fairly interested to see the relative percentages. > Regardless of what *any* one person or 500 people think, this is > a completely preferential and controversial issue. As > controversial as abortion, capital punishment, vi vs. emacs, or > whatever your favourite 50/50 split flamewar is. Given safety (which is, admittedly, only an accurate description of the benefit gained on certain types of mailing lists) versus convenience (which is how *I* describe making easier for users something their *MUA* should be making easier for them instead), it seems to be as obvious to me as the smoking in bars issue -- for the smokers, it's only convenience, they're gonna die of lung cancer *anyway*... but the non-smokers *weren't*. It isn't just the convenience issue the smokers paint it as, and they're trumped. > The bottom line, is that 50/50 split flamewars (or any ratio from > about 40/60 to 60/40 or so) end up almost always in the end, > or at least 99.9% of the time ending with no list change > occuring. Changing behaviour pisses off more people than it > pleases, in particular if a list has had a certain behaviour for > a long time. *That* I can't argue with. > As such, it is extremely pointless to demand that a given list > should change it's policy on this issue, regardless of what > datapoints you'd like to raise. You won't raise even a single > datapoint that the list maintainers, and the majority of > subscribers are not already fully 100% aware of. They just > disagree with you, and are not likely to change their line of > thinking no matter how much you disagree or how big of a flamewar > you'd like to make about it. The best you can do, is agree to > disagree and then move on to another topic - or unsubscribe. Pretty sure that I did *not* advocate *this list* changing anything, Mike. Go re-check the thread. Was merely expressing an opinion. > Regardless of how a particular mailing list is ran with respect > to Reply-To, _anyone_ who is bothered by a given list's policy, > can easily change it on their end to suit their own preference. Well, not always. *This* list permits user set RT's to go through, but some lists do *not*, and in that case, your assertion is incorrect. > If you prefer Reply-To to point back to the mailing list, but the > list does not do that, a simple procmail filter which moves any > existing Reply-To to Cc, and puts the list address from From: or > another header into the Reply-To will accomplish that (that's > what I do). Note that the issue here is "what does my message get to *list subscribers* with a RT set to?" -- an item I *cannot* control if the list doesn't permit it. I don't mind having my opinion ignored on this topic on lists... but let's all be clear, shall we? > If you prefer Reply-To: never replying to the list, then have > procmail strip out the Reply-To: header, and optionally munge > From: or CC: to Reply-To to simulate putting it back. Why would I want to bother? If I could run procmail, I'd just run mutt (or, likely, one of the KDE mailers which probably also get it right) and not worry about it. > One thing is fairly certain however - you are very unlikely to > to change long term list policies/preferences to your way of > doing things via flamewar, and not likely via any other > mechanism, so just deal with it, or unsubscribe. Wasn't staring a flameware, Mike; not real pleased that you're trying to cast me as *having* tried to start one... and since the original question was "is there an automated way to make sure the querent gets an answer" and *I've answered that twice, with an offer of code and been ignored*, I reserve the right to be cranky for being bitched at about the issue. 'k? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100 The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 OS X: Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows -- Simon Slavin, on a.f.c _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
