Re: Proposed change for subscriptions...
On 3/12/06, Steve Lamb <grey@dmiyu.org> wrote:
> This has been asked for and rejected for the past several years. On
> many things Debian is sensible. On this Debian is downright negligent
> and utterly stupid. Want to know the reason why it isn't implemented?
Because not every user who has a question wants to agree to receive
hundreds of email messages a day as the price. Because a community
that accepts non-subscribed mail to its lists is "friendlier" than one
that doesn't. Because subscribing to the list *is* a barrier, and
*will* prevent a good number of people from asking their questions.
If you've ever used ns2, you know what a beast it can be, especially
if you want to do something that wasn't quite envisioned by the
authors. Their mailing list is closed to non-subscribers, and gets
heavy traffic. Most of this traffic is completely irrelevant to me,
dealing with minutiae of implementation. Since that's the only method
for providing feedback or asking questions, I can't provide feedback
or ask questions, since the price is higher than what I'm willing to
pay.
Mozilla goes one better. If you want to provide feedback or a bug
report, you have to create an actual account with Yet Another Password
to remember. To me, that's a clear statement that they don't want
user feedback. The same applies to any project using Bugzilla.
Open posting is *good*. Yes, I get spam because of it, but most of
that is caught by Gmail's spam filter. Some days I don't get a single
false negative, and most days I only get one or two. Most of the spam
I get because of this list isn't even sent through the list. It's
sent to my actual email address, since the list archives make an
excellent target for harvesters. Adding a subscribers-only rule for
sending mail to the list wouldn't help this at all.
--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
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