Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 15:32:51 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: DARREND@novell.com (Darren Davis) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org, postmaster@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Ahhhhhhhhhh! Message-ID: <20907.834445971@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 10 Jun 1996 08:40:12 MDT." <s1bbde1b.006@fromGW>
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> Or, must I suffer this fate? Any suggestions on how to manage this much > email? Jordan, how do you deal with all this traffic? I don't, I just suffer through hours of reading it each day. There are a couple of things we can do to help. 1. END THE BLOODY CROSS-POSTING! During our recent debate, the start of which had -stable, -hackers and -current (plus myself) on the cc line, I got 4 different copies of every single follow-up in what turned out to be a long and boring thread. 2. END THE LONG AND BORING THREADS! It should be evident to most people with an intellect and social sensitivity exceeding that of motor oil that, after the 3rd or 4th iteration, any long-winded trestise on "The ax register and making complete audit trails of every transition from bootup to shutdown" is going to appeal to a very limited audience and probably bore the rest so badly that they'll be chewing through their VGA cables just to escape the thread before long. For #1, I'm actually going to ask our long-suffering postmaster if there's any way for us to kill cross-postings automatically. Quite frankly, if something is sent to any of the major FreeBSD mailing lists (hackers/stable/current) then I think that it's already quite enough and if the user feels the need to cross-post then they're probably trying to lump too many things into one message and should break it down to a specific interest group level anyway. If there's some way for us to build a table of precedence and make automated decisions like "if hackers and stable on cc line, stable wins" then I'm all for instituting this immediately. People aren't showing any degree of self-control at all in how they follow-up to things, simply whacking `r' (or whatever) blindly and not even checking the header. Yes, there are messages which start life with a legitimate reason for being cross-posted but they still lead to long threads which don't, so we might as well just cap the problem at the source. The second problem I'm not sure about, though I guess we could try and be self-policing about it. If it looks like someone is going on excessively in the lists then I encourage each and every subscriber who doesn't like it to send them a _personal email_ telling them to tone it down. I figure after somebody receives 2 or 3 messages saying "take it to private email, already!!" they'll be more inclined to cut to the chase. Jordan
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