Re: ignoring the CoC in regards to cc:s (Re: Can we ship sources of a PDF file in the Debian diff?
On 27 Apr 15:41, Noah Slater wrote:
> 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
Think of the occasions when you actually do want to do an offlist reply - it's
not that uncommon - having Reply-To set to default to the list causes a lot of
people to "get it wrong" because they're used to sensible mailing lists that
get it right - this happens quite often on one of the mailing lists I'm
subscribed to.
> 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.
It's not a technical problem, it's a social problem. Technical solutions to
social problems are always wrong.
> 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.
I wouldn't expect that. I'd expect that if they usually reply to the list they
would configure their MUA to reply to the list.
> 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.
Many many more don't add the Reply-To header as it is harmful.
> 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.
So, user error, not software error...
--
Brett Parker
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