OpenEuphoria

1. [GEN] Re: POLL: Split the List?

• Posted by Ben Fosberg <BenFosberg at ATT.NET> Oct 13, 2000
• 602 views

I agree with the suggestion of adding "platform specifiers" to the subject
line, and, in fact made a similar, if less specific, suggestion a couple of
months ago. It was roundly ignored by everyone, including myself. The situation
has changed somewhat lately, so I'd like to add a few points -

1) Mark's observation seems correct to me;  my experience with other lists and
newsgroups is that multiple lists lead to much mis-posting and cross-posting.
This requires often that who/whatever manages the list has to move/delete the
misdirected msgs and then generate msgs informing the poster as to the
disposition of the errant msg. The total traffic increases without much
increase in convenience unless the overall traffic is very high - hundreds of
msgs per day.

2) Much of the mis-posting usually comes from newbies to the "list cluster" who
are unaware of the classification scheme - using "platform specifiers" and
client-side filters eliminates the problem of newbies not getting seen in the
appropriate group without intervention from the list manager.If your filters
are set to delete or send to subfolders only those msgs containing
"objectionable" specifiers, you'll still see (most of) the calls for help from
the newbies.

3) OTOH, much of the recent traffic objected to by some is not so much a
"platform" issue as a "developer details" issue.  Several of us are probably,
for instance, very interested in [WIN] generally, but not interested in
reviewing a week's thirty different attempts to fix some problem in the
RichEdit control of an unreleased version of the IDE. Expanding the list of
specifiers to cope with all of the permutations of that situation is probably
not going to be feasible.  I think if the platform specifiers as suggested are
generally followed, we will have to reconcile ourselves to applying NAI
(Non-Artificial Intelligence) to the problem - i.e. writing clearly indicative
subject lines, and manually (excuse my language) deleting the msgs whose
subjects are of no interest to oneself.

 I realize the foregoing does not solve the problem faced by very sensitive
souls such as Jiri who seem to be troubled by any reminder whatsoever of the
existence of the world's persistent evils  - such as Windoz.  Furthermore,  it
would appear that either some of the list members' client software does not
have functioning filtering capability, or the members are unaware of it use.
But I still think actually splitting the list into separate streams "at the
source" will cause a net loss of convenience and functionality for everyone.

So I'm "voting" against splitting the list up - and in favor of adopting Ray's
scheme of subject line "platform IDs" and including it in the Welcome message
for new subscribers.


Dan B Moyer wrote:

> Ok:
> 1. For informational purposes, who all wants to split the list up?
>
> 2.  And: Can we?
>
> I like Ray's suggestions (below), except that I think we should probably
> keep this list as  [DOS]  and *add* [GEN], [WIN], and [LIN], because Robert
> once said it was difficult to get the name changed.  But of course a
> question is, can we get new lists?
>
> Ray said:
> "If" new lists are to be created there should be one for each Euphoria
> platform.
>
> Dos,
> Windows, and
> Linux
>
> with this current list kept for generic discussion and "major" annoncements
> from any platform.
>
> For example,
> If I finished a project (probably never happen!!!) I would post a message
> to the main list.  If I had problems/small changes/bug fixes etc I would
> post to the appropriate platform list.
>
> The question really becomes ... would most people subscribe to all the
> lists?
>
> If the answer is ... most people would ... maybe we should have a posting
> standards where [WIN] [DOS] [LIN] [GEN] (like the archive) should be in the
> subject line to easily allow people to filter appropriate messages.
>
> This standard should then be added to the Welcome message sent to a new
> user