[conspire] There's Still Time! Enter the Dr. Dobb's Challenge Now

[Rick Moen]

[Snipping recipients to just one mailing list, for reasons explained below.]


Quoting Edward Cherlin (echerlin at gmail.com):

> Shame on you! Windows! What ever happened to "Running light without
> overbyte"?

I suspect the discipline of computer calisthenics and orthodontia has 
been forgotten there, for many years.

$ whois -H ddj.com | more

[...]
Registrant:
CMP Media LLC
   600 Community Drive
   Manhasset, NY 11030
   US

   Domain Name: DDJ.COM


CMP Media is part of "United Business Media plc" of the UK.

  United Business Media Plc is a leading global business media company.
  We inform markets and bring the world?s buyers and sellers together at
  events, online, in print and provide them with the information they need
  to do business successfully. We focus on serving professional commercial
  communities, from doctors to game developers, from journalists to
  jewellery traders, from farmers to pharmacists around the world.
  [blah blah]

In other words, a Rupert Murdoch wannabe, but with techie-toy/Internet 
fetishes, existing to sell your eyeballs and logdata to advertisers and
data-mining firms.

Anyway, forget about the legacy of the People's Computer Company and Jim
Warren as editor.  These losers almost certainly have never even heard of
either.


However, I have a suggestion.  Your headers had:

To: admin at dobbschallenge.com
Cc: SVLUG <svlug at lists.svlug.org>,
        OLPC Grassroots <grassroots at lists.laptop.org>,
        OLPC Devel <Devel at lists.laptop.org>, conspire at linuxmafia.com,
        its.an.education.project at tema.lo-res.org, baypiggies at python.org

I have good news, and slightly bad news, about that.

The good news is that you can easily make a slight modification to the
way you do these things, such that at least six mailing list
administrator will cease having reason to hate your guts.

The bad news is that it requires a couple of extra steps, on your part.
Which is why mailing list admins like me make suggestions like what
follows a bit forlornly, knowing that most of the time their advice will
be ignored, and that they'd be better off taking a Valium and
concentrating on becoming an uncarved rock.


The problem with what you did:  By sending out a private e-mail, CC'ed
to _six_ public mailing lists, you've created a situation where any of
the six lists' subscribers who responds will, in the general case,
create a message held for moderation in the admin queues of the other
five mailing lists (except where he/she happens to subscribe to such a
list).  This syndrome then persists through second, third... Nth
generation replies, as long as the thread lasts on any of the six
mailing lists.

Further, sometimes, denizens of one mailing list rub the wrong way
denizens of another with whom they suddenly find themselves having an
unplanned running conversation.  In those cases, the six listadmins find
themselves wading through a cross-list flamewar, in addition to having
to deal with gratuitous held postings.


Suggestion:  Don't ever crosspost two mailing lists, and don't ever CC a
mailing list on your private mail to a non-listmember.[1]  Instead,
first send your private mail to the non-listmember.  Then, call up the 
aforementioned sent mail, and _forward_ it to a (1, one) mailing list.
If desired, then do that again with a second single (1, one) mailing
list.  Continue until done.

Listadmins all over the world will thank you, if not specifically then
as a general proposition.

[1] Exceptions exist, where the listadmin expects to handle CCs to
non-listmembers because of that communications mode being an explicit
part of the list's purpose.  One local example is
volunteers at lists.svlug.org , which is a public point of e-mail contact
for the group, instead of just being a mailing list per se.