At 12:11 AM -0500 3/2/02, Steve Summit wrote:
>See also http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html for a
>comprehensive explanation of why munging Reply-To to point to the
>entire list would be Wrong.
I hope this doesn't become a long discussion here, and I have no
interest in changing the configuration of faq-maintainers. (However,
Steve will note that he got two or possibly three copies of this reply
because I did a "reply to group" and didn't fix the headers manually.
Hi, Steve.) But since this has been mentioned, I think it needs a
response.
Though the author of that page makes some good points, he omits some
important ones. He briefly mentions that some people think making
replies go preferentially to the list is good for helping to build
traffic, but then simply declares this to be wrong with no reasons
given, and certainly no understanding shown of the human dynamics of
discussion groups.
His reasoning sticks too close to the technical points and doesn't look
at issues of actual human behavior.
Building critical mass for discussions *is* important. Many people have
tried to set up discussion groups without understanding this issue,
have subdivided the discussions so that none reach critical mass, and
seen their groups die. Email headers have no way to indicate to the end
user (much less to the user's software) a preference for increasing or
minimizing list traffic. Yet it makes a lot of difference to the
atmosphere of the list, and saying this doesn't matter is simply wrong.
People who use mailers a lot generally get into "reply" mode. Most do
*not* think at the moment of a reply whether they are replying to
individual email or a list, and whether they want to reply to one or
all. As pointed out, this causes problems. But it also means that the
preferred response method for a given environment should be the
default. In email, the only way to do this is with the Reply-To.
These are human factors, not technical issues, and they do matter.
The basic problem is that email isn't set up for group discussions, and
discussion lists are a big kludge built on top of email. At the very
least, to make email reasonable for group discussions, messages should
have headers Reply-To-Originator, Reply-To-Group, and Reply-Preference.
But mailing lists don't have those, and mailers don't support them. In
short, arguing about how the Reply-To should be handled is a bit like
arguing about whether two plus two is seven or nine.
There *is* a better way. It's called ... get this, folks ...
newsgroups! Now it's true that newsgroups don't support
Reply-Preference. But they do make Follow Up distinct from Reply (at
least with non-broken newsreaders), which helps a lot. Reply (aka Reply
to Originator) uses the Reply-To address, and Follow Up (aka Reply to
Group) uses the Newsgroups or Followup-To address. Newsreaders make the
environment distinct from email. Many mailers don't even support
threads, which almost all newsreaders do. And now that many newsreaders
support multiple news servers, it's easy for most people to subscribe
to a newsgroup that's only carried on a private server. I'm currently
subscribed to newsgroups on three private servers as well as on a
Usenet news server, and at times in the past have subscribed on two
other servers.
So anyone who really cares about this issue should be setting up
discussions for access via NNTP, rather than as mailing lists.
Now to repeat, I see no reason to change faq-maintainers. We get enough
discussion of any issue that comes up. We are basically here to
exchange information and solve problems, not to build a community, so
it doesn't matter if the list goes silent for weeks at a time. Let it
be. But in the general case, I don't think it's as one-sided as that
web page makes it out to be.
Edward Reid
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