On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Vladimir Prus <vladimir@codesourcery.com>wrote:
Hi, it seems that the way most Boost mailing list are configure is fairly inconvenient, especially for newcomers. Here's a typical chain of events:
1. Somebody reads Boost mailing list via Gmane and wants to post. 2. He posts. 3. Gmane responds, asking the user to prove that he exists. Somewhere in the body of the message, Gmane suggest that user subscribes to the mailing list, but it's very easy to miss, and furthermore, those instructions do no work for Boost mailing lists. 4. User replies, and Gmane forwards the message to the list. 5. The list is configured to reject email messages from non-subscribers. When using Gmane, this results in *no notification at all*. 6. User posts directly, and gets bound message saying, literally:
allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has been automatically rejected. If you think that your messages are being rejected in error, contact the mailing list owner at boost-docs-owner@lists.boost.org and [email address]
This message does not even hint that the user has to subscribe. 7. User subscribes. His post in the held for moderation.
I have personally was fairly confused by (6) -- where my messages disappear silently, and by (7) -- where the message seem to say my messages are specifically rejected. I suspect many users might not make it to the point (7) at all.
Can we configure all mailing list to not reject posts from non-subscribes, instead holding them for moderation. This will also require talking to mailing list admins to enable at least some spam filtering -- presently, messages written in the languages I don't understand seem to freely hit boost-build mailing list moderation queue, and for boost-devel this will be impossible to handle.
Comments?
The moderator route is always an attractive one from some perspectives, but as always the difficulty is who has the time to moderate? I can see the scenario you outline has some drawbacks, but to be honest I've always found the registration/posting mechanism quite straightforward. I've always encountered Gmane simply as an email archive, and never thought to post to it! I don't think there's enough of an issue here to justify the effort of changing it. - Rob.