Re: Proposed change for subscriptions...
On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 15:09, Steve Lamb wrote:
> > You've been around long enough to know how things work. You know the
> > project has a policy of open, non-moderated mailing lists.
>
> Yup. And I've made it well known I think it is a pretty dumb policy
> for the reasons stated.
>
> > You also know
> > that to change that policy you need to convince either the
> > lists-masters or the project as a whole. Abusing the lists-masters on
> > -user won't help.
>
> Yes, it does. As I told Anand a person who approaches them in
> private has their voice squelched in private. A person who brings it out
> in public and gets support from other people in public can start a
> snow-ball effect of even greater public support.
>
> It's real easy to ignore a single voice in private. It's a lot
> harder to ignore many voices in a public forum.
>
Certainly feel free to have the discussion in public, but keep it calm and
rational.
Personal abuse of the listmasters won't help. Ever. If you can't discuss
things in a calm and reasoned tone, then you will only alienate people,
including potential supporters.
> > Seriously, how much spam are you getting from debian-user?
>
> On a good day, about as equal to what makes it through my filters to
> my inbox. On a bad day d-u is the major contributor to the spam that
> makes it through my filters.
>
Now is this
(i) spam as in unsolicited commercial/bulk email,
(ii) noise as in clueless user looking for eg. windows help,
(iii) noise as in clueless linux user "how do I ...",
(iv) noise as in "that was asked and answered 3 times last week",
(v) noise as in not this argument again?
Personally I find the noise to be a big problem. But I don't believe that
requiring subscription before posting will solve it. (I concede that it
will help,) but I expect it would discourage the roughly the same
proportion of (ii), (iii) and (iv). Each discouraged (iii) and (iv) is a
potentially a lost user.
I don't believe subscription will help with (v) (short of unsubscribing the
offenders of course).
> > Personally I like the fact that people can post from accounts which
> > aren't subscribed. It's very convenient to be able to add a cc to
> > another list to get an opinion on a issue from a specialised list. It
> > makes it much easier to cope with debians 141 active lists[0].
>
> Granted. So the question then becomes can there be a mechanism
> provided that would allow such posts without open lists? For example
> allow linked posting rights based on subscription to *a* mailing list
> hosted at lists.debian.org if not the specific list being posted to?
>
That doesn't help with say, a GNU Classpath developer dealing with a bug
which looks like its debian specific, and wanting to discuss it on
debian-java.
If you really want to see the current policy changed, then present a
constructive, rational argument to the lists-masters and/or -project. eg.
Gather statistics about how much spam gets through per day/week/month.
Start a new thread titled eg. [VOTE] Should debian-user require
subscription before posting.
If you can gather enough (ie overwhelming) support, take the discussion to
say -project, and try to convince the project as a whole. Personally I
don't like your chances. -devel seems committed to open mailing lists.
Andrew
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