podcast listings missing a digit

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2014-10-01 at 10:09 +0100, Owen Smith wrote:
> Given that Reply goes to the sender, and Reply to All goes to the
> sender and CC's the list, it is not surprising that replies are going
> to the wrong place. I've done it several times myself.
> 
> Is it not possible to get the list software to set the Reply To header
> so that replies always go to the list?

Absolutely not.

You have two 'reply' options in your mail client. One ("Reply") gives
you a *private* reply, which goes *only* to the sender of the message
you're looking at.

The other ("Reply to All") gives you a *public* reply, which goes to
*everyone* who received the message you're looking at.

What you suggest is horrible. You basically want us to attempt to hack
the behaviour of *everyone's* mail program, to trick it into sending a
*public* reply when they actually asked for a private reply.

Why would you do such a thing? If they want a public reply, there's a
button for that. Hijacking the *private* reply button to do something
unintended is just going to lead to people posting things to the mailing
list that they *really* didn't want to be said in an archived public
forum.

The simpler approach is just to remain sober enough that you can just
press the right button for yourself, not ask us all to suffer for you.

Sometimes your hack is justified on the basis that it makes life easy
for people who can't think clearly for the millisecond it takes to
decide what they want to do. You know, the kind of people who hit 'reply
to all' on a message to the whole department, then blame the sender of
the message they *replied* to. But that justification is nonsense,
because this hack is just making things more *confusing* for the
hard-of-thinking. It's better to *never* hack the behaviour of the
different reply types, so that a private reply is *always* private and a
public reply is *always* public. Then it's nice and simple. You don't
help people by making it inconsistent.

cf. http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

-- 
dwmw2
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