[conspire] wtf ? sonic

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (tony at of.net):

> Taking it back public...
> 
> On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:00 PM, Tony Godshall <tony at of.net> wrote:
> 
> > Like Rick, I don't take conversations private without a good reason

People _do_ drop off mailing lists into private mail accidentally for
oft-discussed accidental reasons (inability to deal with reply-all vs.
reply-sender).  

For many years, I was in a bit of a dilemma when a sudden departure to
private mail happened:  You want to respect other people's private
discussion, and yet it seemed as if overwhelmingly frequently there was
no call (apparent reason) for privacy, and certainly no explanation
provided for the sudden unannounced switch to private mail.  Moreover,
before I started procmail-filtering mailing list mail into a separate
mbox, the other party's dropping of the mailing list from headers
was tough for me to even spot:  I'd often realise only a few responses
later that my very carefully crafted technical responses had been going
out -- contrary to my expections -- to an audience of just one, instead
of the community for whose benefit I'd written them.  (I.e., unpaid
consulting, rather than participation in a community.)

That syndrome was _very_ vexing in the cases where I'd put serious time
and effort into what I'd intended and expected to be a public reply.
Suddenly, wait, why am I not seeing my posts on-list?  Check headers:
'Goddamn it.  The other guy dropped to private mail two posts ago.  And
now I can't even ethically post my replies back to the mailing list,
because they quoted his (unexpectedly) private mail.'

For many years, I honoured without exception the other party's privacy
-- even though 99% of the time, the other party _wasn't_ seeking
privacy, but just blundered.  Sometimes, I say 'I'm guessing you used
private mail by accident, and am forwarding your post back to you so you
can post it.  If by some wild chance you actually want a private
discussion, please write back and say so -- and please take greater care
to avoid dropping from an ongoing public discussion into private mail
without an explanation in the future.'

The latter turned out to be hopeless:  As I've learned time and again,
user education just, by and large, doesn't work.

But then, there turned out to be an additional 0.9% (I assume, not
present company), above and beyond the 99% who drop into private mail
accidentally, who do it because the public discussion has become
inconvenient / embarrassing to them personally and want to kill it, but
find it easier to sidetrack you misleadingly into private mail rather
than just saying 'I want to drop this', or just ceasing to post.

I'm assuming there _must_ be a 0.1% somewhere with a real need for
sudden privacy who just failed to mention it, but -- oddly enough --
nobody's _ever_ said 'Oh yeah, I switched to private mail because I was
going to discuss my [/your] private affairs, and just failed to mention
that, sorry.'  

So, in my experience, 100% of correspondents who've done so have had
only _bad_ reasons for unexplained and unannounced drops from public to
private mail -- either inadvertancy / addiction to Reply-To munging, or 
actual deliberate misleading.

Thus, in recent years, I got tired of extreme care for other people's
privacy in situations where their resort to private communication was
always either a screw-up or (in rare cases) a minor con-job, and changed
my policy:  If I see no apparent need for privacy, and none was
mentioned, I tend to just post back to the public forum and say 'Appears
to have been dropped to private mail accidentally.  If you wish a
private side-discussion, please mention that fact and why.'

Seems to deal appropriately with both the 99% and the 0.9%.  If the 0.1%
ever shows up, then I guess they'll just need to learn to explain sudden
drops to private mail for non-obvious reasons.

(I'm up in the middle of the night because I'm on 24x7 on-call sysadmin
duty.  Fun.)