[liberationtech] Liberationtech Mailing List Survey

[M. Fioretti]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 12:50:58 PM -0700, Yosem Companys wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Based on your feedback, a short 3-question survey of the
> Liberationtech community will be conducted to determine what changes
> to implement...  Should you have any questions, please let me know.

Not really questions, but a few remarks and notes for less experienced
email users yes, I do have them:

> Would you like to make the Liberationtech archives public or private?

I assume that, whatever the result of this question will be, they will
only impact the _future_ archives, say from september 2012 onward,
right? Archives of earlier months should remain "private" in the sense
you explained, simply because you have been telling throughout all
that period that they would be private. Of course yes, it's only a
matter of principle, NOT a really effective measure. But making
privacy settings changes retroactive is the kind of things that
Facebook does, not a list with the goals that this one as.
 
> Should reply-to's be sent to the entire list or the individual sender?

Regardless of what one thinks is the right choice, setting reply-to to
"individual sender" gives NO guarantee at all that replies will go the
individual sender. All decent email clients include a "Reply-to-List"
function that works exactly as its name says regardless of that
setting, and many people (including me) use it all the time, almost
inconsciously, when replying to anything they got from a mailing list.

>  Should we reduce or eliminate the list-email signature text?
>  - Keep text signature as is
>  - Add  "-- " prior to text signature to enable auto-hiding in most
>    mailers
>  - Eliminate text signature completely

the second option shouldn't be there at all. It's something that
everybody, not just this mailing list, should do as standard
netiquette anyway, regardless of what the signature is. The "-- " is
called sigdash and has been around almost 30 years (1) for valid
reasons, why should it be an argument of discussion? Please keep only
the two other questions. If the survey says "eliminate signature",
this also eliminates the sigdash. If the survey says "keep signature",
why should it be in a non-standard format?

(1) http://www.newsreaders.com/guide/sigs.html

Marco
-- 
http://mfioretti.com