Sounder List Functionality

[Eric Dunbar]

On 2/19/06, Benj. Mako Hill <mako at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> <quote who="Randy Gloden" date="Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 10:16:05AM -0600">
> > I noticed the list sends out it's messages with the "From" address of
> > the person who submitted the message instead of sending it out from
> > sounder at lists.ubuntu.com.  Problem with this is that often people are
> > hitting reply and sending the message back directly to the poster,
> > instead of the list.
> >
> > I have gotten several off-list messages and Mark S. made mention of this
> > a few days back as well.  The other lists I'm subscribed to send out
> > mail from the list address and is much more convenient.
>
> Well, we want to keep the "From" address because the messages are,
> after all, *from* the person who originally sent the mail and we need
> to mark it somewhere. I don't know of any list that changes the "From"
> address in this way.

<snip>

> Among communities with people from different experiences and
> backgrounds, the issue of reply-to fields can be very
> contentious. There are many people in the Ubuntu community who prefer
> the Reply-To field to be set and others who want it unset. People on
> different lists feel differently about what the best practice is.
>
> This became a large debate with the ubuntu-users mailing list a year
> or so ago and it managed to get appealed all of the way to the
> community council. The decision by the CC was to set the reply-to on
> the users list and leave it unset on all of the others. Unless you
> want to argue that the list consistencies or the feelings of those
> individuals about Reply-To has changed in the last year or so, I'd
> prefer to leave things as they are.

... and what a lovely debate it was!

'Reply-to list' for the ubuntu-users "trouble-shooting" list did at
the time and still does seem appropriate. Most discussions there
_should_ (but aren't always ;-) be of a technical/operational and
distro-specific nature, and the questions and answers are relevant to
the public record (even if they are sometimes the 55th asking of the
same question ;-).

Sounder is, well, a sounding board. If your question is not of an
operational nature, it probably belongs on sounder. If a sounder post
gets lost to the public archives, it's not a major loss to (wo)mankind
since it probably doesn't mean the difference of solving a problem or
not to someone perusing the archives in the future! If the poster
feels that their contribution was important enough to get recorded for
posterity's sake, then they can repost.

To me (as a the vocal advocate of "reply-to list" for ubuntu-users ;-)
it seems that it doesn't really matter what the default behaviour on
sounder is -- if anything, the current state of affairs is probably
the better state of affairs.

There have been a few times when I posted something which went off to
only the original poster, and, if I felt it necessary to post to the
forum I reposted (probably still too often ;-P)... this did avoid some
useless posts from going out to the world (a little less GIGO from me
;-).

Eric.