Bug in mailing lists; unfriendly to non-subscribers

[Greg Woods]

On Mon, 2010-07-05 at 20:13 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:

> Fact: a community benefits from all kinds of contribution, even from
> one-post people

That is an opinion, not a fact. I happen to believe that the nature of
the post makes a difference as to whether it is beneficial to the
community. As an example, someone coming in and doing nothing but
bashing Fedora without offering any helpful suggestions as to how to
improve it is not beneficial to the community (this is not a reference
to you in any way, it is just an EXAMPLE to illustrate the point). But
this is just MY personal opinion, and I don't run this list.

> I wan't aware there's a religious war about this,

The "right" way to run a mailing list has been a religious war on the
Internet for at least 30 years now. In this case the term "religious
war" means there is really no proven right answer and there are strongly
held opinions on all sides.

> And who is that? Do I need to subscribe to yet another mailing list to
> contact him?

If the list is listname at server, the list owner is almost always
listname-owner at server, or users-owner at lists.fedoraproject.org in this
case. But if you write to them, be polite. This *is* a religious war
that has been going on for decades, and the people who run the Fedora
list do know what they are doing. I cannot speak for them as to whether
they would be receptive to suggestions, but they probably have their own
religious opinions, and I can be fairly sure that they won't be too
receptive to someone who comes in and acts like he knows more about
running lists than they do. Stating an opinion is one thing, doing it in
a way that belittles anyone who doesn't agree is another.

--Greg