Re: Mailing list guidelines?

[Emanuel Berg]

The bug report system: I see (and agree). I had never seen the mail
thing happening before on Usenet, but I have only been active on
groups that are not about computers.

For sure, I won't send HTML messages or screenshots of text. Those are
almost hacker insults :) But, those are good points to make in a FAQ
such as the one you think about compiling.

Likewise: a section (or paragraph) on where to send replies. (I for
one don't know that, and I dislike IM, Facebook, and Twitter as much
as anyone.)

One source of confusion is that you refer to a mailing list, but to me
it looks like any other newsgroup. When I hit `f' for
`gnus-article-followup-with-original' (to followup a post), is that
equivalent to the "list-reply" that you mention? If the OP is not a
subscriber, will [s]he still get a reply, as a mail? (In Gnus, you can
reply to the OP by email by pressing `r' for `gnus-summary-reply', but
I never used it. Then, also, I take it the rest of the list won't get
it?)

(I saw your tip to read an article on lists and groups. I've haven't
done so, but I'm not ignoring that piece of advice. Possibly those
questions are answered there.)

Answers to the above questions could go into the FAQ, as well as your
solution how not to get the mail followups.

I agree that writing the FAQ incrementally whenever there is
meta-discussion is the best solution. But, unless there are many
people working taking in interest, perhaps a wiki is overkill. If you
write it (and format it) in the way that you find most GNU
documentation (which you know a lot better than me), it'll be more
accessible (for example, to w3m users), *and* you won't have any
overhead fighting spammers. Well, just a thought.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573