Doug Ewell wrote:
> And there is the problem somebody mentioned with "Re:
> [unicode] Re: [unicode] Re:..."
The list software seems to be smart enough to rewrite the Subject header so
that there is only one [unicode]. My mailer is prepending RE: to the
"[unicode] [OT]..." subject, but I doubt this will show up in the post. We
shall see.
> These latest changes, in contrast, seem to have been made
> and deemed unchangeable for arbitrary reasons, just to
> prove that Sarasvati is in charge.
Before you foment too much discord on the list, understand that there are,
on any list, decisions that must be made, especially when configuring new
list management software. Some of these decisions do not play well in a
democracy because for certain issues, people sit pretty far on one side of
the fence or the other. So the decisions are not put to the list to decide.
The list administrator is under no obligation to please everyone, and no
matter what choice is made, someone will feel they are being imposed upon.
I've threatened quoting restrictions on my own lists but never implemented
them, for the technical reasons you described. The hundreds of listmembers
receiving the digest form of one my lists are forced to wade through pages
of carelessly quoted text, and I'd like to help them, but I think the
decision to enforce quoting quotas would just shift the inconvenience from
half of the readers to all of the posters, a tradeoff that isn't worthwhile,
IMHO. But it's still my decision to make.
Is the iron fist of Sarasvati's benevolent dictatorship is a symptom of the
alleged arrogance of the Consortium? I doubt it. It's just the reality of
running a large public mailing list, and until you've done it yourself, it's
easy to sit back and complain or say how much better things would be if you
were running it and if we were using Yahoo or whatever.
I, for one, am glad Sarasvati is as attentive to these issues as she is.
There are many lists that suffer greatly from poor or under-administration,
and this is not one of them. I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates
what she does for the list, and I hope she doesn't let any of the backlash
from whatever decisions she makes get under her skin.
- Mike
____________________________________________________________________
Mike J. Brown, software engineer at My XML/XSL resources:
webb.net in Denver, Colorado, USA http://skew.org/xml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:15 EDT