At 9:23 AM -0500 23/1/98, Douglas Mitchell wrote:
>On my e-mail, the choice is to Reply or ReplyAll. If I want my
>reply to go only to the sender, I use Reply. If I want it to
>go to the list as well as the sender, I use ReplyAll.
So what exactly are you saying, that we shouldn't change anything? I would
prefer the Reply option to be addressed to the List, and the ReplyAll
option to include the sender. Maybe this seems like a small, unnecessary
detail to some people, but I believe that this simple change would make a
big difference to the quantity and quality of information that passes
through rp-ml. If I have any knowledge of human behaviour, I would say most
people who want to respond to a message just hit the Reply button and don't
think too much about whether or not the message includes the List. In
practice this means that many messages are left without a follow-up because
the passage of information or the discussion continues privately. That is
not fair to those subscribers who do not actively participate in the
discussions (the majority of the List).
>One of the lists that I am on adds a Postscript with information
>on unsubscribing, another list has it in the header.
Our administrators should include URL's pointing to adminstrative and other
subjects (e.g.archives) automatically added to messages as they get
distributed. That would reduce the numerous "please unscribe me (sic)"
messages and others that flow through this List quite frequently. Adding a
List sig. does present a problem when discussions get hot, however, because
people quote other people's messages without trimming the originals before
posting them, which in practice means that signatures get quoted and
requoted over and over again, adding considerably to the length of each
posting. The answer to this is to keep quotes to a minimum, and cut out
unnecessary information, but that is probably too much to ask most people
to do. My rule of thumb is: try to keep the entire message on one screen,
maximum two.
------------------------
Yakov Horenstein
Milano, Italy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:44:46 EEST