[melbourne-pug] last post

[Brian May]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2015 at 12:45 Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

> It seems you dismiss the idea that the administrator should do what is
> best based on the facts and trade-offs, whether or not it is most
> popular. You defer that responsibility instead to whichever group
> marshals the most voices.
>

This will be my last post on the matter.

I suspect many people for setting "reply-to" have this misconception "that
would never happen to me" or "but this is a public mailing list".

It isn't until it does happen to you that you realize the hidden dangers.

Yes, the chances of this happening are low, however the risks are high.
Even if everybody subscribed to this mailing list acts in a professional
and understanding manner when a mistake was made, the archives are
available indefinitely for anyone to look at.

What is missing is concrete examples. Lets say for example I thought that
person XYZ's public post was abusive. So I intend to write him a private
message to complain about his behaviour. Only my anger was due to a
misunderstanding, and in my moment of anger didn't realize the email was
going to the mailing list. In fact, the reply-to makes it rather
inconvenient to send private replies. So suddenly I have potentially
damaged XYZ's reputation and my reputation over a stupid misunderstanding.
Yes, it could be argued that people should read the full thread before
coming to any conclusion, including my follow-up apology; however many
won't - and if the apology crossed a month boundary, the mailing list
archives won't have a direct link either.

I actually don't care any more, and I subscribe to many different mailing
lists with different policies that you really can't trust "reply" or "reply
group" functions to do the right thing.

Actually it is shame that most mail clients don't handle mailing lists in a
better way, mutt for example has a list reply function that automatically
extracts the list-id header and sends the email to that address.

(mutt also has a ignore_list_reply_to setting but unfortunately that
doesn't appear to look at the list-id header and has to be manually
configured with a list of mailing lists; might try to file a bug on that)
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