Request to mailing list get_iplayer rejected

[David Woodhouse]

On Tue, 2010-10-19 at 17:37 -0700, CHRIS wrote:
> wanker
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: get_iplayer-bounces at lists.infradead.org
> [mailto:get_iplayer-bounces at lists.infradead.org] On Behalf Of
> get_iplayer-owner at lists.infradead.org
> Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2010 2:02 PM
> To: chris-davies at shaw.ca
> Subject: Request to mailing list get_iplayer rejected
> 
> Your request to the get_iplayer mailing list
> 
>     Posting of your message titled "help"
> 
> has been rejected by the list moderator.  The moderator gave the
> following reason for rejecting your request:
> 
> "No HTML mail please. See http://david.woodhou.se/email.html"
> 
> Any questions or comments should be directed to the list administrator
> at:
> 
>     get_iplayer-owner at lists.infradead.org

Thank you, Chris, for your eloquent yet succinct request that I should
reconsider the decision to bar HTML posts to the mailing list.

The filters which apply to this list are inherited from other lists
which I run. Over the years I have found that there is a *strong*
correlation between those make their posts hard to read by top-posting,
quoting indiscriminately and/or sending 'prettified' HTML messages, and
those whose messages aren't really worth reading anyway. I suspect both
are related to a lack of attention when composing email.

I've found that by asking people to pay just a little bit of attention
to how their email will be received, it seems to cause a big improvement
in the quality of communication. Barring HTML also catches a certain
amount of spam which manages to get through the other filtering.

I had wondered, as I tended to the moderation queue yesterday, whether I
should relax the rules on the get_iplayer list. It is, after all, a
different demographic to most of my other lists, and there have been a
number of people initially attempting to post HTML who *didn't* seem to
be particularly poor at communicating — and it's a fairly low-traffic
list so it perhaps doesn't matter so much if messages are harder to
read.

Your response has helped me to decide that I won't relax the rules just
yet. Thank you for the guidance.

-- 
dwmw2