Subject Lines on the Mailing list: [WAS: Looking for a NH mail list talking about Linux]

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Tue Mar 27 10:59:03 EDT 2007


On 3/27/07, Jon 'maddog' Hall <maddog at li.org> wrote:
> Every time I saw "MythtvFest" in the subject line I felt duty-bound
> to read it ...

  Yah, I do try to change the subject line when forking a thread.  The
problem is, most people don't -- they just keep hitting "Reply to all"
all day long.  It's worse when I try to change the subject line, but
others don't, so the thread continues under two subjects.  It's worse
still when multiple people try to change the subject line at once, so
now we've got multiple alternative subjects, plus the people still
using the original subject line.

  ~sigh~

> ... this takes discipline ...

  Something people don't seem to be good at, in general, I've noticed.

> Perhaps the "discuss" list should be broken down into two parts:

  Yah, this has been proposed here before.  By me, even.  There are a
problems with it:

(1) Where to draw the line?  Politics and everything else?  Technical
and non-technical?  What's technical and what isn't?  Who decides?
Social?  What about politics?  I might like hearing about opinions on
TV shows others like, but want to avoid the ever-popular "evil
gov'mint" discussions.

(1)(a) What about those who insist on ramming their personal agendas
down everyone's throats?  And where do we draw the line *there*?  When
does it stop being a preference and start being an agenda?

(2) What about discussions which touch both subjects?  Where does that go?

And most of all:

(3) This requires just as much, if not more, discipline than changing
the subject line.  If we can't get people to mind the subject line,
how can we get them to manage this?

> discuss-tech
> discuss-social
>
> with "discuss" simply being the union of the two.

  I'm not sure how well that would work in practice, especially given
the "reply all" and discipline problems previously described.  I
suspect we'd see most threads ending up being cross-posted to both
lists.

  Any which way we slice it, if we want to go in this direction, we
need to designate some topic police.  Which I'm okay with doing, if
that's what people want, but given past discussions on this
meta-topic, I'm not sure it's what people want.

  (Currently, the only real "rule" we have (and it just came into
being yesterday, per me) is the banning of instructions on how to
perform illegal activities, or pointers to same.  That's a legal
shit-magnet I just don't want on a server I personally own.)

-- Ben


More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list