Subject: Re: Reply-to-sender
Date: Feb 4 11:36:51 1998
From: Michael Price - mprice at mindlink.bc.ca


Hi Tweets,

Dan Victor writes:

>As your *Benevolent Tweetator* I am willing to change the setting back to
>Reply-to-list. I will be counting votes posted and/or sent to me
>privately.

Your Benevolence, '-)

I gave it a fair test to see if prolonged usage would overcome my initial
dislike of it, but do prefer the reply-to-list default.

So, I vote to revert to reply-to-list (vote early and vote *often*! '-).

>1) Inadvertent postings meant to be private are less likely to clutter the
>list....

But isn't inadvertency never more than a fractionally tiny amount of any
month's postings, let alone each day's?

>2) With Reply-to-Sender non-subscribers, such as Dennis Paulson (and a
>number of others) get copies of the replies to their postings or queries.
>There may be a number of responses to a posted query but the when the
>default is back to the list, unless the responder copies the
>non-subscriber he/she doesn't get a copy of the response(s).

Then for whose convenience is the list run? Its members or non-members?
While respecting Dennis and appreciating his too-infrequent posts, wouldn't
this be a case of the non-subscriber tail wagging the membership dog?

>3) With Reply-to-Sender Digest subscribers get immediate response(s) to
>their postings or queries instead of having to wait for the next day's
>digest.

I thought about how to get around this day-delay for Digest folks and also
the problem of non-subscribers who post, then realised there's a fix for
this: they can bookmark the Siler Web-page at

http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~siler/TWET.html

for an up-to-the-minute update to see how the discussion is going. Or
subscribe. '-)

>4) The appearance of the header is reduced and looks more manageable, and
>at least with the Pine mailer, looks less confusing.

Can live with it.

>I vote to keep the it Reply-to-sender.

Respecting that point of view, it's not a hugely important ideological thing
to have it either way, but since I reply almost invariably publicly,
preference is reply-to-list.

Michael Price A brave world, Sir,
Vancouver BC Canada full of religion, knavery and change;
mprice at mindlink.net we shall shortly see better days.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)