[Mailman-Users] Re: Reply to list

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On Feb 5, 2004, at 4:58 PM, Paul H Byerly wrote:

>      I think the issue for the developers is theory vs. reality.  What 
> is the desired behaviour for the majority of new Mailman lists?  
> Should not that be the default, with appropriate explanations?

This isn't the answer some will want to hear, but -- the defaults are 
the desired behavior for the majority of new mailman lists, based on 
the combined wisdom of the Mailman developers, and after long 
consideration and not a little enthusiastic discussion among interested 
users here on theese lists (you think this is the first time this has 
come up?)

You may not agree with them, they may not be appropriate for your list 
or users, but they aren't set that way by mistake or accident. They are 
set based on how we feel things work best under normal circumstances 
and for typical (especially less experienced and non-geek users). Our 
feeling is the geeks and the experts know how to tweak their own 
enivronment to suit their needs, the novices don't. So the geeks don't 
need us setting defaults -- and the novices do.

We also don't feel that the argument "yahoogroups" does it, because 
some of us feel that Yahoo is horribly broken (and remember, 
yahoogroups is configured to maximize messages that go through the 
list, and entries that go to the archives, because that maximizes how 
many ads they can send and how many click ads they can display. Those 
are not necessarily the best reasons to set defaults if you aren't 
trying to generate a revenue stream like Yahoo). Besides, if you buy 
into the argument that Mailman should do things like Yahoo becaues 
Yahoo is really large and they do it that way, then I guess all e-mail 
clients ought to operate like AOL's does, and we should throw out all 
client features that, and we should dump mac os x and linux for 
windows, because of microsoft's market share. Large market shares is 
not a persuading reason in and of itself.

> well documented.  I'd like to think most folks who are new to Mailman 
> will take as much time to learn it as I did, but what I see on this 
> list suggests that this is less and less common.

You only see the problems on this list. You don't see the much greater 
number of sites and users who are happy. Be ware of assuming the 
squeaky wheel speaks for the whole wagon....