podcast listings missing a digit

[Mark Rogers]

On 1 October 2014 15:33, Owen Smith <owen.smith at cantab.net> wrote:
> I'm so used to Reply going to a sensible destination for all my other emails

There are two buttons: Reply and Reply All. There are two potential
actions: reply just to the sender, and reply to everyone.

Forget everything you think you know and try to match those two
actions up with the best button to use for each.

The problem is that you've been conditioned by other mailing lists to
expect something different, and this may well be the only list that
does it this way that you use, and it is your experience that is
defining what you consider to be "sensible". Which is fair enough if
your experience is global (or sufficiently broad) so that others have
the same expectations. Very many lists work the same as this one
though, so many of us are used to this behaviour rather than the
"reply goes to list" behaviour. I suspect most of us have seen both
options and wish there was one standard (and, frankly, not care which
standard it was as long as it was global). But back in the real
world...

Now, given that confusion is a given, (a) which makes most sense when
you take the various expectations based on past experience away, and
(b) which does least harm when it goes wrong. For the reasons above,
for (a) the behaviour here makes the most sense. For (b), is it better
that a public email stays private, or that a private email gets made
public? Surely the best option is one that never makes private email
public, and for that reason the behaviour here wins that one too.

But rest assured, *you* are not the problem. The issue is that various
list administrators over the years have changed the settings to make
things a bit easier for people who hit reply and wonder why it doesn't
go to everybody. Those people still have problems in normal email when
one is sent to a dozen people and whilst the reply is clearly intended
for everyone it only goes to one person due to them hitting Reply. The
second issue is that when some list admins make this hack, others
didn't. The third is that through luck (or lack of it) you've mostly
hit the hacked ones and learned to expect that behaviour.

As an aside, if you've ever replied privately to someone with a
problem, and included personal contact details in an offer to help fix
the problem, only to find that the contact details were sent to
everyone (I have...) you'll appreciate that "private by default" is a
good idea, not a bad one.

Mark
-- 
Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450
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