On Tue, 2001-11-13 at 07:16, Jon Glass wrote:
> For me, surprising would be a reply to the original poster, the least damage
> would be to automatically reply to the list, and absolutely, the least work
> is being able to reply to the list without having to delete the original
> replyto address, and insert the list address.
For me, least surprising would be if my mailer did what it said it was
going to do. If I get a mail in that's addressed to multiple people,
and I press 'reply' and it goes to all of them, that's surprising. If I
wanted to reply to them all, I'd use the perfectly nice 'reply-all'
button that my mailer graciously gave me. (Notice that we had another
one of those just an hour or so ago, with James E sending what should
have been a private reply to the list, then sending an apology about
that. Look, two extra pieces of mail to the list, because the principle
of least surprise and least work were violated.)
Least damaging: I want to make a private comment, and, because of the
principle of least surprise, I reasonably press 'reply' and it replies
to the author. If 'reply' instead replies to everyone, I can
accidentally make enemies. The long and short of this is that flamewars
and OT discussions tend to be a lot shorter on non-munged lists, because
you have to make a conscious decision to reply to the list, so when
things go OT or angry, it tends to default to reply instead of
reply-all. I know that a lot of my AppleTalk stuff from the other day
would have been off-line if the list didn't make it hard for me to do
that.
And your least-work comment doesn't make sense. If you want to reply to
the list, you don't delete anything and insert anything. You hit the
reply-all button. Without reply-to munging, each of 'reply to only
sender' and 'reply to list' are one button click or keypress away. With
reply-to munging, you have to dwink with things.
> Why do you think that people
> want to reply to the original sender automatically?
Because that's what the reply button is supposed to do -- reply to
sender. It works that way on every mail I receive -except- mail from
NTLK. NTLK breaks the UI of my mailer. It's like an HTML page that
makes visited links blue and unvisited links red -- it's not just
nonstandard, it's the opposite of the standard.
> For one, I would prefer
> that people replying to my posts on NewtonTalk not CC me privately. Once, on
> the list is enough, and is under the control of my mailing list manager. A
> private reply gets dumped in my in tray, adding to the unmanageable clutter
> that already exists there.
(*nod) There's a certain sense to that. You can usually make your
mailer filter anything with newtontalk_at_newtontalk.net in the recipients
into the right place, meaning that even if you get two copies of the
same thing, they'll both end up in the correct place.
But, yah, if the list management software doesn't take a minute to see
that one of its members is already on the recipients list and not send
an extra copy, it's also somewhat broken.
If IIRC, this was discussed ages ago, when the
> list first went to PlanetNewton, and the overwhelming majority decided to
> have reply-tos go to the list, and not to individuals.
Fair enough. I wasn't around for that, and I certainly don't want to
start it up again. I'll just keep muddling along trying to remember
that mail from newtontalk acts differently from other mail... ;-)
-- R Pickett The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, Hayseed Networks legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs emerson_at_hayseed.net eagerly for just two things -- bread and circuses.-- This is the Newtontalk mailinglist - http://www.newtontalk.net To unsubscribe or manage: visit the above link or mailto:newtontalk-request_at_newtontalk.net?Subject=unsubscribe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Dec 01 2001 - 20:02:44 EST