Re: ignoring the CoC in regards to cc:s (Re: Can we ship sources of a PDF file in the Debian diff?
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 04:19:08PM +0200, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> Noah Slater wrote:
> > Either you avoid Reply-To because it is "harmful" and accept that you will get
> > carbon copies from the commonly implemented group reply function of modern mail
> > clients, or you include the "harmful" Reply-To header and avoid it.
> >
> > What am I missing? This seems too obviously flawed an argument.
>
> Either you add it, which is harmful, or you don't, and people should use reply
> to the list when replying to the list. Most (or many) MUAs have a trivial way to
> do that, as you already know. So instead of 'replying to all', just 'reply to
> the list'. Not too complicated, and you could start to do that with other lists too.
How many MUAs actually have a Reply To List feature? Gmail and most of the other
online Web mail clients do not have this feature. Microsoft Outlook doesn't, nor
does Thunderbird by default. So based on this alone, the Debian CoC is depending
on an uncommon feature for proper behaviour.
Even if this was a common feature of MUAs, it presents a significant usability
barrier. Most people struggle to use Reply and Reply To All properly, without
the additional cognitive burden of having to remember when they are specifically
replying to a mailing list.
You're arguing that a Reply-To header is "harmful" (not that I am convinced) and
so people should learn to use some additional, uncommonly found, feature of
their MUAs to work around the technological problem. I don't buy this argument
at all. Technology should adapt to human behaviour, and not the other way
around. There is something fundamentally wrong when we try to solve a technical
problem with a Code of Conduct.
Without a Reply-To header, we should expect people to Reply To Group. It doesn't
matter if we have a Code of Conduct, people will always make mistakes. The only
sensible thing to do in this situation would be to recommend that people who
care properly configure their Mail-Followup-To and Mail-Reply-To headers.
If Reply To Group is so harmful that we want to avoid it completely, then I
think we should consider adding a Reply-To header to the mailing list emails -
like many other mailing lists do for exactly this reason.
P.S. I had to manually edit the To and CC headers of this email before sending
out because I had forgot to press the L key in mutt, one of the few clients that
actually has such a feature.
Best,
--
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater
Reply to: