[conspire] [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Google and Georgia

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> BTW - Matt, join Moen's Conspire mailing list if you want to post to it.
> Its often a facinating read anyway.  One of the gems of the net.

That's nice of you to say that, but let me elaborate on what I meant
when I said I wished people wouldn't cross-post between mailing lists. 
(I notice you again cross-posted between here and
hangout at mrbrooklyn.com, for the above.)

Currently, the following (pretty new) messages are in the admin queue:

  The conspire at linuxmafia.com mailing list has 2 request(s) waiting for
  your consideration at:

          http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/admindb/conspire

  Please attend to this at your earliest convenience.  This notice of
  pending requests, if any, will be sent out daily.


  Pending posts:
  From: prmarino1 at gmail.com on Wed Aug 13 22:59:29 2008
  Subject: Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Google and Georgia
  Cause: Post by non-member to a members-only list

  From: mph at dorsai.org on Thu Aug 14 12:16:57 2008
  Subject: Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Google and Georgia
  Cause: Post by non-member to a members-only list

Most of the time, the admin queue for the various Mailman lists I
administer (and I administer quite a few for various Linux and BSD
groups) have nothing but spam in them that made it that far, past the
MTA rejection rules.  Those, the ones that are visibly almost certainly
junk by the nature of their Subject headers or claimed sending
addresses, I just ignore and they expire out.

However, once in a while, held postings like the above show up that are
probable non-spam.  I spend time looking at the contents, to make sure.
Those tend to be postings from the regulars, forgetting which of their 
various e-mail addresses is subscribed and posting from the wrong one
(e.g., work versus home versus free webmail).  As a courtesy to 
regulars, I try to always spend time writing a nice message-rejection
notice explaining what happened and suggesting that the subscriber sign
up his/her alternate addresses but set those additional addresses'
subscriptions to "nomail".

But suddenly, when you've crossposted, I _cannot_ assume followups are
necessarily from Conspire regulars:  It might be a Conspire subscriber
whose alternate address I don't recognise, _or_ it could be a Hangout 
subscriber with no particular interest in Conspire, who in many cases
will have been unaware that you included a second mailing list in your
distribution at all, and thought he/she was contributing to a Hangout
thread.  If I write back to a Hangout person explaining why his/her
Conspire posting is being rejected and how to subscribe that additional
address and set it "nomail", experience suggests I'll get confused
and/or hostile responses.  (This is not a complaint about such people:
The problem is inherent in the situation.  Which gets me back to you,
the creator of that bad situation:)

So, you see, you're not only creating additional, avoidable manual work
for me as listadmin, but also creating situations that are ambiguous, in
that I don't know which held postings are from which list's subscribers.

That is part (only part!) of why I plead with people to kindly not
cross-post between mailing lists:  You tend to create a big hassle for
both the listadmins and for various of the various lists' subscribers
whose followups will inevitably get held for manual treatment on the
lists to which they're not subscribed.