[plt-scheme] Re: Mailing list subscriptions

On Jan 10, Avi wrote:
> Sorry about not subscribing, I did not read the emails on that
> e-mail acccount. I think it's a good idea to subscribe people
> automatically.  If a person bothers to join the group probably means
> to subscribe also, well at least I did.

Thanks for the clarification!  This might explain other cases where I
got no reply for similar requests.


On Jan 10, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> Peter Horst wrote at 01/10/2010 03:37 PM:
> >
> > It would also be somewhat rude to just bounce all messages from
> > non-subscribers with a note saying "here's how to subscribe," but
> > I still think that's the better answer.
> 
> I, too, think that a bounce with brief, polite URL/info on how to
> subscribe is definitely the way to go.

Let me clarify this a little: the absolute overwhelming vast majority
(probably more than 95% of them) are coming from people who would want
to subscribe but are not aware of mailing list subscriptions etc.  I
suspect that most of these are coming through the google group mirror,
and for such cases being subscribed doesn't make much of a difference
because gmail does not let duplicate messages through.  IMO, it is
important to have such posts go through, because the people in these
cases are newbies that are unfamiliar enough that a bounce would be
ignored and never acted on.  (An in a spam-infested reality, another
very likely thing is to ignore such automated-looking messages, either
by the person or by mail servers.)  For these cases registration is
the obvious thing (and I suspect that many of them actually expect to
get subscribed this way...).

Cases that don't fall in this category are people who make
announcements and replies to cross-list-posts (which cause lots of
administration pain, BTW) -- and since I do this (semi) manually, I
know about these cases, and will avoid the registration.  Finally,
there is a very small minority of people who I don't know, and who
intentionally post without wanting to subscribe, and who don't know
about the mailing lists being able to have you subscribed without
getting messages (or are too lazy to do so).  This is such a small
portion that if in the message that I'll send I'll offer to do that if
that was the intention, the overall amount of work would still be far
less than what it is now.

(And BTW, yes -- choosing the reject-with-instructional-message option
is by far the easiest option from my POV.  It means zero moderation
effort since it can be completely automated.  But in a similar spirit
of being newbie friendly (which I think Scheme in general and PLT in
particular need to encourage until it gets as popular as
<insert-mainstream-language-here>) I would hate to see such posts fall
on the floor.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!