[mythtv-users] Re: OT: Reply-To munging / mailing list configuration

[Brad Templeton]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 11:10:41PM -0500, Isaac Richards wrote:
> Because of the nature of these lists, all replies, with very few exceptions, 
> should go to the list.  That way, people can do neat things like finding 
> solutions to problems by checking the archives.  People taking things private 
> should be the exception, not the rule, and I think it should be a conscious 
> decision for someone to do so.

Which I can appreciate.  I just felt that deliberately reversing an explicit
reply-to was a bit much (I had not realized it was done because some
broken mailers inserted it without the user asking.)

I reply directly to users a lot.   If there's ever a flame war and a user
starts making insults in a message, I (almost) never reply in public, and wish
nobody else would too, since that's what fuels those things into giant
insult-fests that nobody else is reading.   To some extent replies of
the form "You're the 23rd person this week to ask this, go search on
gossamer threads" might be better off private most of the time; these
people aren't searching so they won't see the other repeats of this message.

Of course my attitude is perhaps getting old.  When the net started, public
traffic was expensive not just in human time but in resources.  When people
asked a question, the expected norm was people were supposed to _only_ reply
in public, and it was the expected duty of the asker to summarize the
responses they got to that question.   If they didn't summarize, the
answerers could re-post their answer and chastise the asker for not
summarizing.   This was a must because many people had day-long propagation
or more for their messages (because UUCP links only ran at night.)  If
you didn't do this, 50 people would post the same answer to the question,
not having had a chance to see the others.

We're long past that need to stop the 50 same answers, but I actually think
it was a good system.