Michael Meeks talks about LibreOffice and the Document Foundation

Posted Sep 29, 2010 7:02 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (guest, #32870)
In reply to: Michael Meeks talks about LibreOffice and the Document Foundation by neilbrown
Parent article: Michael Meeks talks about LibreOffice and the Document Foundation

> Post by non-member to a members-only list

You might be spoiled by the kernel infrastructure. But I hardly know any email list that is open for posting from non-members. It's annoying but hardly a deal-breaker, IMHO :). If that is the worst problem of the new project, then they have everything under control :).

Michael Meeks talks about LibreOffice and the Document Foundation

Posted Sep 29, 2010 22:21 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (3 responses)

All the GNU lists I run require subscription to post without moderation. It's simply the only way to get the smart folks you want to track the lists to continue to subscribe to them: no one has time to wade through spam.

The GNU lists (based on mailman) do have a nice feature that "known spam" is automatically deleted from moderation queues. This, plus giving moderation privileges (which mailman can assign separately from list maintainers privileges if you like) to a number of trustworthy people, means that it's easy to keep on top of the moderation list and it's very rare that email gets held up more than an hour or two.

On the other hand, I am subscribed to a few lists where it seems like people only check the moderation queue once a month or so: then I get a huge chunk of new mail, often backdated a number of weeks. That's pretty lame, I do agree.

This is a small price to pay and if you don't feel like paying even that price, you can always subscribe and then disable mail delivery (again, at least for mailman...) so you don't get moderated and you also don't get any mail (say you read through some other medium).

Michael Meeks talks about LibreOffice and the Document Foundation

Posted Sep 29, 2010 22:54 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (2 responses)

I tried to identify what I really didn't like about the "Your message awaits moderator approval" email I got and it seems to come down to the "to a members only list" part. It comes across as saying "we are a closed community and aren't interested in what others have to say" - which clearly isn't true, but does seem to be implied by the text.

Had the message been more friendly, e.g.

------------
Thanks for your email with subject: $SUBJECT
As this is your first post to $LISTNAME the message will require approval
by a moderator after which it will, if acceptable, be forwarded to the
list. This normally takes $AVERAGE_WAIT_TIME. Subsequent posts by
you will then be accepted without moderation.
------------

then I would have had nothing to complain about.
I think it is important that newcomers feel welcomed and "members only" doesn't sound welcoming.

Michael Meeks talks about LibreOffice and the Document Foundation

Posted Sep 30, 2010 5:40 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Honestly, this is probably best filed as a bug report with mailman. I'd prefer that message on the lists I moderate too, but not enough to actually set it up... (esp. since someone would have to make sure $AVERAGE_WAIT_TIME stayed accurate, which is best done in software).

Michael Meeks talks about LibreOffice and the Document Foundation

Posted Sep 30, 2010 12:05 UTC (Thu) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

Filed as https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/651980