Re: Proposed change for subscriptions...

On 3/12/06, Steve Lamb <grey@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This has been asked for and rejected for the past several years. On
many things Debian is sensible. On this Debian is downright negligent
and utterly stupid. Want to know the reason why it isn't implemented?

Because not every user who has a question wants to agree to receive
hundreds of email messages a day as the price. Because a community
that accepts non-subscribed mail to its lists is "friendlier" than one
that doesn't. Because subscribing to the list *is* a barrier, and
*will* prevent a good number of people from asking their questions.

If you've ever used ns2, you know what a beast it can be, especially
if you want to do something that wasn't quite envisioned by the
authors. Their mailing list is closed to non-subscribers, and gets
heavy traffic. Most of this traffic is completely irrelevant to me,
dealing with minutiae of implementation. Since that's the only method
for providing feedback or asking questions, I can't provide feedback
or ask questions, since the price is higher than what I'm willing to
pay.

Mozilla goes one better. If you want to provide feedback or a bug
report, you have to create an actual account with Yet Another Password
to remember. To me, that's a clear statement that they don't want
user feedback. The same applies to any project using Bugzilla.

Open posting is *good*. Yes, I get spam because of it, but most of
that is caught by Gmail's spam filter. Some days I don't get a single
false negative, and most days I only get one or two. Most of the spam
I get because of this list isn't even sent through the list. It's
sent to my actual email address, since the list archives make an
excellent target for harvesters. Adding a subscribers-only rule for
sending mail to the list wouldn't help this at all.

--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com

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