Re: List administrators - request for intervention - was - Re: Mailing list unsubscription requests and identificatio
On Sun, 13 Aug 2023 Andy Smith wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Sun, Aug 13, 2023 at 12:12:49AM +0000, davidson wrote:
>> The foregoing demonstration is meant to show how, using alpine's
>> threaded mode, I minimise my irritation with threads that I find
>> irrelevant to my interests
>
> Unfortunately no matter how advanced your MUA is, it doesn't help
> against prolific posters who derail nearly every thread with copious
> amounts of irrelevance and outright false information.
This is a higher bar than merely neutralising the disruption (to one's
own use of the list) caused by a popular thread that one has little
interest in.
And here, my instincts are screaming "Leave it here. Stop now. Leave
well enough alone for the sake of all that is holy!"
However, and speaking only for myself, I'll bite:
Being able to see a thread's messages structured as a tree of message
headers (author, subject) can indeed help me infer quite a bit about
what's going on, before I bother to dig in and actually read any of
the messages' content.
For example, let P and Q be two regularly prolific participants, P
with exceptionally high signal-to-noise contributions, and Q a hot
willfully clueless mess. If there is a branch of the tree that is just
a chain of back-and-forth between P and Q --Q.P.Q.P.Q...-- then I know
what's going on in there and so some OTHER branch will be my first
destination, unless I'm in the mood for a laugh.
> You can easily see from looking at most of the large threads here,
> the points at which they go off the rails and the common factors
> involved there.
I can indeed. Without seeing the tree structure, I do not think it
would be so easy to see.
> It is a difficult problem to solve as mailing lists like this tend
> to promote a volume-wins approach,
You may be correct, but this isn't clear to me. (Unless the object of
the game is to annoy the greatest number of participants.)
> and the baseline user will not have an advanced MUA nor necessarily
> the experience to know that they're reading nonsense.
When I conquer the world, you will know because /etc/motd will contain
something like this:
Don't enter commands you don't understand, and you won't understand
the commands unless you read the manual. If you read the manual, you
STILL may not understand the commands. Nevertheless, keep trying,
Curious Human. We are rooting for you!
> Things get easier when you use an advanced MUA, so people should
> invest the time to do so, but let's not pretend that this will avoid
> a mega-thread next time some outlandish thread hijack by one of the
> usual suspects happens.
My point was simply this: threads I've lost interest in (regardless of
size) are a single line in my mailbox, provided I do not delete its
initial message.
> Does this particular thread go much better if you assume that
> everyone participating (except the OP, who doesn't know how to
> unsubscribe, or how to spell it) is fully competent at efficiently
> managing email but still posts as they posted?
Funnily enough, if you look carefully, you can see some utterly
slapstick confusion of that very nature in this thread, over who is to
blame for posting a red-herring link to the Alpine Linux distro
mailing list:
%<------------------------------------------------------------------------------
18159 Thursday glenn green (6K) . UNUBSCRIBE
... ... ... ... ...
[1] 18192 Yesterday fjd (7K) . | \-Alpine was
[2] 18193 Yesterday Bret Busby (8K) . | |-Re: Alpi
[6] 18194 5:55 fjd (7K) | | |-Re: Al
[7] 18195 6:11 fjd (8K) | | \-Re: Al
[3] 18196 Yesterday Jeffrey Walton (7K) . | \-Re: Alpi
[4] 18197 Yesterday Greg Wooledge (5K) . | \-Re: Al
[5] 18198 2:41 Bret Busby (9K) . | \-Re:
18199 Yesterday David Wright (6K) | \-Re
------------------------------------------------------------------------------>%
Somebody requests a link to an alpine MUA forum or mailing list.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2023/08/msg00333.html
Somebody posts a link to an alpine MUA mailing list.
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2023/08/msg00341.html
Somebody else posts a red-herring link, to a mailing list concerning
the linux distro called Alpine Linux.
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2023/08/msg00355.html
Then Greg points out, in reply to the red-herring poster, that they
have posted a red herring. <-- Here is where the tree structure view
is illuminating.
[4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2023/08/msg00356.html
And then the person who had posted the CORRECT link in the first place
apologises for posting the wrong one, and posts the very same correct
link once again. <-- This person, it would seem, is reading messages
as a SEQUENCE, not as a TREE. (Because the tree makes clear to whom
each message is a reply.)
[5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2023/08/msg00360.html
(The person who really HAD posted the red herring says nothing.)
And then yet another person chimes in to thank the poster of the
correct MUA list link. And then he follows up, informing us all that
he has just realised (from reading debian-user, not from examination
of the link's target) that this (correct) link has been subsequently
discovered to be incorrect.
[6] https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2023/08/msg00381.html
[7] https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2023/08/msg00382.html
--
Hackers are free people. They are like artists. If they are in a good
mood, they get up in the morning and begin painting their pictures.
-- Vladimir Putin
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