Re: [Evolution] A Digression on Digests

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Tue, 2011-04-05 at 18:15 +1000, Nick Jenkins wrote:
> [...]

> The software also makes is hard to
> do the right thing if you are reading digests (requiring people to start
> a new message, not a reply, and make sure it's in text format not HTML,
> and manually copy the subject header, and manually add a "Re: ", and
> manually copy plus ctrl-shift-v paste the quoted message text above it,
> then crop the message, then manually insert the reply inline below the
> relevant quoted text). That's a 7-step manual process, and if they do
> any of this wrong, we yell at them. And then we're surprised that this
> keeps happening?!

You seem to have missed the point somewhat. All the above steps are a
waste of time, because you're still replying to a digest. No amount of
cutting, pasting and fiddling with formats will make this right unless
you also change the In-Reply-To header, which is the only thing that
matters to threading. That's why I'm so emphatic: don't reply to
digests, ever. Use the mailer's facility to reply to the digest
component, or if it doesn't have such a function use Gmane or one of the
other news<->mail gateways to reply to the specific message.

Nevertheless, the best solution is simply not to use digests at all
unless your only interest is in reading or archiving the list without
ever wanting to reply to a message.

> If we want to prevent this from happening, to stop having the same
> ground-hog day discussion yet again, then "the right thing" should be
> easy and it should be the default, and "the wrong thing" should be hard
> and should require malicious deliberate intent.

There we agree, hence the suggestion in my post.

>  We can debate the merits
> of digests and whether they should exist, but the fact is that they DO
> exist in the real world, and the software should deal with them without
> making it easy for users to look bad. *Nobody* wakes up in the morning,
> slap their hands together, and goes "today I'm going to publicly violate
> group etiquette, whilst displaying my lack of knowledge about mailing
> lists, and for kicks I'll make it ironic too!". On the contrary, most
> people have a strong drive to fit in and to belong and to understand the
> perspectives of other people in a group, because humans are acutely
> social creatures.
>
> So the above rant explains why I cannot and do not blame the user, and
> in terms of converting that into something constructive specific and
> actionable, here are two suggestions:
>
> 1) If someone attempts to reply to a mailing list digest, how about a
> dialog box that says:
>
> "Replying to a digest is generally a bad idea.
> Which message in the digest did you wish to reply to?
> 1) Subject 1, blah blah
> 2) subject 2 test test
> 3) subject of message 3 and so forth"

More simply: "To reply to a digest component, do this: ..."

> ... and then the user clicks the message that they want to reply to, and
> it does the useful stuff like inserting "> " quoting of just that
> message, and 80-character line wrapping, and uses text rather than HTML
> formatting, and puts the cursor at the end of the message.

No need to elaborate. Just using the normal reply function is enough.

> 2) If someone replies to a mailing list message, and that message has a
> "List-unsubscribe:" header, and the message subject is "unsubscribe" or
> if the first non-quoted word of message of the body is "unsubscribe",
> how about we pop up a dialog box saying:
>
> "You can unsubscribe yourself from this mailing list <a
> href="http://link-to-unsubscribe-from-the-list-unsubscribe-header";>at
> this website</a>. Are you sure you wish to continue sending this
> message? [discard] [continue editing] [send]".

These are worthwhile suggestions IMHO.

> ... because until we do those 2 things or something like them, I refuse
> the blame users who simply don't know any better, and who do the most
> obvious thing. "Be the change you want to see in the world", "make it
> easy for your users to kick arse", and all that good stuff.

It's not about blame, it's about education. I think I can say that my
own responses to digest replies have been polite if occasionally
forceful. I haven't called anyone an idiot, though I do tend towards
sarcasm if they quote an entire digest without trimming (I'm sorry, but
some things really need to be said).

One suggestion regarding policy rather than code: don't reward the
mistake by treating the digest reply as an ordinary comment and then
continuing the conversation, which will often just compound the
mislabeled thread. My policy is to delete the entire body and limit
myself to a "don't reply to digests" comment, in hopes that the poster
will resend his message correctly within the existing thread.

poc