reaction@lists.debian.org
Hi,
We seem to be suffering from a spate of rather tedious threads that go round
and round in circles recently (here and on debian-private).
Quite often these end up giving a false impression of the consensus view,
because most people don't want to fan the flames by mailing on the subject, so
we see the minority view more than the majority view.
I've come up with an idea that might enable us to use mailing lists for
consensus building, and dampen the reaction to some of the more outlandish
mails.
We could set up a magic address (i.e. reaction@lists.debian.org) to which one
could reply to messages, in order to express an opinion without clogging up
the real list.
Instead, you reply to the message on which you want to comment (so that the
thing you send contains an In-reply-to: header, with a subject line consisting
of one of the following: agree, disagree, undecided, uninterested
When a message gets received by `reaction', it looks for the message ID that
is being replied to, and logs it against that message in the mailing list
archive.
The running totals for opinions received could be made available via the
mailing list archive web pages.
This way, when someone comes up with a particularly bone-headed suggestion
(like this one perhaps :-) instead of starting a flame war, we could just wait
for a significant disagree:agree ratio to appear and point the original mailer
at the web page, with either a short explanation of the common view, or the
suggestion that they look through the archives for the reason why.
Cheers, Phil.
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