[HCoop-Discuss] RFC: Subscribing new members to help and discussion lists by default?

[Daniel Wagner]

On 2013-07-25 14:24, Adam Chlipala wrote:
>  Originally in 2002, HCoop was just a set of friends sharing a
> server.  The earliest levels of evolution maintained group dynamics
> not too far from the starting point.  We had just one mailing list
> for everything, from "there will be downtime tomorrow" to "can you
> recommend me some blog software?".
> 
>  At some point I realized that many members were not interested in
> reading the high volume of messages that can be generated in some
> threads (like this one, actually).  These members would start
> ignoring all HCoop-related e-mail, which causes a variety of logistic
> problems.  That's why I created multiple mailing lists, including an
> announcements list that everything must be subscribed to and a
> discussion list that is opt-in.  There is a serious risk that opting
> certain members in to the latter by default will cause them to decide
> "HCoop sends too much e-mail" and ignore _everything_ we send.  We
> had some members who were intimidated at the thought of understanding
> what a mailing list is and how to control subscriptions.
> 
>  From this perspective, it's an especially bad idea to decide on a
> change by polling those members who happen to be paying close
> attention to hcoop-discuss.
> 

This is a really good point, and it's good to hear about why things are 
as they are now. Still, I'm vaguely in favor of auto-subscribing new 
members. Perhaps some compromise could be worked out.

I guess people get an email telling them when they're newly subscribed 
to a mailing list with details like "you just got subscribed, more 
information about the list is here, instructions to unsubscribe are 
here, etc.". Maybe it would be enough to add something to this message 
on the lists we expect may have high traffic in the plausible future 
where all members are on the lists, saying, "Oh yeah, and by the way, 
this list may be high traffic. If you unsubscribe from this one, you'll 
only get critical updates and that will be a lot less mail.".

~d