Proposed change to the MOO-Cows mailing list

• Date: Tue, 16 May 1995 14:53:15 PDT
• From:
  Pavel Curtis <pavel@parc.xerox.com>
• Reply-To:
  Pavel@parc.xerox.com
• Content-Length: 2416
• Content-Type: text

I recently received the following proposal for a change to the workings of the
MOO-Cows mailing list:

>     As one of the many subscribers to the Moo-cow mailing list I've
> gotten a lot of good advice from my fellow subscribers, however recently
> the large amount of spam, BS and generally unrelated information has
> rendered the list particly useless. I would like to propose a possible
> solution, that the Moo-cow list adopt a format similar to that used by
> the DecStation Managers list.
> 
>    The format of the Decstation Managers list is very simple. People
> post their questions to the list, then other subscribers send email to
> the poster with any advice they may have. After waiting a suitable
> amount of time, the orignal poster posts a follow up message to the list
> in which he/she summarizes the responses he/she received.
> 
> So if moo'er@moonet.org sent email to moo-cows with the subject 'Compiling
> Moo under Minix' the listserver software would set the reply-to field of
> the message to moo'er@moonet.org (so that replys wouldn't go back to the
> list), after a day or two moo'er@moonet.org would send another message
> to the list 'SUMMARY: Compiling Moo under Minix'.
> 
>    Works well for the Decstation Managers, hopefully it would work well
> for the moo-cow list.

I've noticed, as probably all of you have, that the level and sometimes
quality of the traffic on MOO-Cows have taken turns for the worse in recent
months.  This suggestion, which would in effect tend to steer the traffic away
from long pointless discussions and towards productive (and perhaps
FAQ-quotable) answers to specific questions, might be the fix that's needed.

I can easily modify the MOO-Cows mailing-list configuration to add the
specified Reply-To: line to every message, and I could even add a little text
at the bottom of each message describing in brief the intent (i.e., send your
questions to the list, gather the responses and later post a summary), so that
members would be reminded of the appropriate use of the list.

The question is, would the current list membership consider this a positive
change?  I have given this message a Reply-To: line pointing responses back to
me, personally.  I will summarize the results in a week or so and, if there's a
preponderance of positives, implement the suggested changes.

Yours in service of the goal of a more useful list for us all,

	Pavel

• Re: Proposed change to the MOO-Cows mailing list
• From: Alex Stewart <riche@crl.com>
• Re: Proposed change to the MOO-Cows mailing list
• From: Edward S Briggs <esb@hopper.unh.edu>

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