Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!sprite.crd.ge.com!montnaro From: montnaro@sprite.crd.ge.com (Skip Montanaro) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: GNU Mailing Lists Message-ID: <8908130331.AA00782@sprite.crd.Ge.Com> Date: 13 Aug 89 03:31:53 GMT Reply-To: gnu-misc-discuss@cis.ohio-state.edu Distribution: gnu Organization: GNUs Not Usenet Lines: 34 Bob, I've seen many complaints about people posting to the gnu.* newsgroups instead of mailing to the gnu mailing lists. At our site, nearly everyone interested in GNU/FSF reads the gnu.* newsgroups - very few people get any of the mailing lists, so it's not surprising that we either forget or don't know the mailing list addresses. (I'm guilty myself.) I have three ideas for improving the situation, in order of (my) preference. 1. Why not moderate the gnu.* newsgroups (at least officially)? I thought one of the features of the News software (correct me if I'm wrong) was that messages posted to moderated newsgroups were automatically mailed to the moderator. Couldn't the moderator's address just be the mailing list address? 2. If 1. isn't possible, could the posting program be coerced to add a header field (maybe Followup-To, or X-List-Address, or ...) to each message that indicates the proper address to which postings should be mailed? 3. There are 17 GNU mailing list/newsgroups. There's no regular naming scheme for the mailing lists, so there's no hope that people reading the gnu.* groups can convert from newsgroup name to mailing list name without a crib sheet. Not all gnu.* newsgroups appear to have mailing lists (gnu.config comes to mind.) The mailing lists aren't all hosted on the same machine either. Why not create a set of mailing list reflectors, all on a single machine, with names derived directly from the newsgroups (e.g. gnu.utils.bug -> gnu-utils-bug@std.address)? The reflectors could simply forward all incoming mail to the real mailing lists. Skip Montanaro (montanaro@sprite.crd.ge.com)