mail-list behavior, was: iplayer audio to lpcm

[Mark Rogers]

On 8 Nov 2014 22:41, "Owen Smith" <owen.smith at cantab.net> wrote:
>
> People don't always agree to their postings being published
> elsewhere, or their email address being publicised outside of the
> lists they have subscribed to.

The vast majority (citation needed!) of mailing lists are public and
publicly archived. This one is. By posting here your email address is
publicised worldwide anyway. Whether cross posting is sensible or
acceptable depends on the context and the rules of the list, both of
which you should be aware of before posting.

This whole debate about mailing list replies is never going to be
resolved because people come at it with different experiences. If you
take a step back and look at it with fresh eyes it's pretty simple:
there are two possible actions (reply to everyone, reply only to
sender) and all mailers have at least the two options of Reply All and
Reply. If you insist on mapping Reply to "reply to everyone" then you
either have to make Reply All reply only to the sender (which would be
daft), or make it do the same as Reply (which is redundant and makes
sending a reply to the sender only much harder).

The problem is that people don't think. That's a generalisation not a
specific insult, it applies to most if not all of us at least some of
the time. I've run mailing lists for non technical people (indeed for
people who didn't understand email at all - this was late 90s). And
(naïvely) I set up reply to munging as a convenience because people
just didn't get it and couldn't be made to think logically or to read
the instructions. And let's be honest, I made the choice because I
wanted people to use my mailing list. On the other hand, mailing lists
targeting more tech savvy users don't need to bodge things to make
them easier. Which is fine as long as the two never mix. But they do.
A "savvy" person in one field is a novice in another. So then you have
two sets of conventions which conflict and there isn't anything you
can do to change that.

But faced with making a choice, I would have to say that since when
you step back and look at it only one convention actually makes sense,
that's the one I would always choose now.

I'll just add that I'm on dozens of mailing lists and the *vast*
majority behave the way this one does.

Mark