Dear Dan (and tweeters cc'd),

Thanks for giving it a try. I didn't think the people who run the
listprocessor would allow it, judging from the uncompromising and
condescending e-mail replies you and I received to our earlier queries.

I certainly hope you don't think I was "pounding on" you about this!
Judging from a couple of the recent postings, I gathered that at least a
few subscribers may have had that impression. But what I was referring to
was, as you know, the intransigent reception we both got from the UW
administrators when we approached them to explore possibilities. Basically
they threw the rule book at us and suggested we leave such matters to our
cybersuperiors.

I do think that the default is better the new way, but it is evident that
many subscribers prefer it the way it was. Tweeters is a hybrid list that
serves two audiences. For one audience -- the one that uses the list as a
kind of open town meeting -- the old default "reply to list" is the
appropriate one. The other audience uses the list as a bulletin board,
searching for items of personal interest and replying directly to the
person who posted them (why should I let the guy who's advertising free
kitties know that I'm looking for a rideshare to Kansas City?). The
cohabitation of these two sometimes conflicting functions within the same
service is why we have the present disagreement.

As I have said in the past, and reiterated recently, the only possible
resolution would be to have two separate lists, and let people subscribe to
either or both of them. Or we can learn to live with the conflict, with
one side or the other at least mildly unhappy.

But I do not believe that the change needs to be a win/lose situation at
all. On the contrary, it is *every* subscriber who loses when messages
intended for individuals are posted to the whole list. Making sure that
those who do send messages to the list are doing so consciously (and not by
accident) places the burden of responsibility where it belongs. This
reform will not in and of itself shut down, or disrupt, the "town meeting"
aspect of tweeters. Where there's a will there's a way, and our leading
contributors *will* communicate!

Let me cite an analogous experience. I don't know if you are a regular
BirdBox user, but if so, you may remember that the original (pre-crash)
version was plagued with blank reports. People would call in, enter the
chickadee code, press a number when the menu played to see what would
happen, and end up in the report-recording mode by accident. Hearing the
beep and not knowing how to extricate themselves, they would hang up. This
resulted in a "report" being recorded that was nothing other than a few
seconds of silence followed by the sound of a handset hitting the cradle.
Since the system only stored a limited number of reports, every "dud"
report would replace a legitimate one, which subsequent callers would no
longer be able to hear. And the system administrator had to monitor the
inbox constantly to detect and delete all the "dud" calls -- often several
per week.

When we rewrote the program after the crash, we decided to improve the way
reports were recorded and stored. There were several changes, but the main
one was to make the caller actively save his or her report after leaving
it, whereas before, you saved it by hanging up. Let me say that the
modification has worked perfectly. Since the BirdBox went back up again on
October 12, incorporating this new feature, we have had not a single dud
message! Occasionally a distracted caller will not pay attention to the
prompts, and hang up, in which case that report is lost. (We know this
because they figure it out, and call again sheepishly to rerecord the
report.) But I do not think we have lost very many reports that way, and
if a caller has done it once, he or she learns right away to save future
reports before hanging up. The result has been an improvement in service
for all concerned, at the modest cost of expecting those who leave reports
to pay attention to what they are doing.

Anyway, I think this will prove to be a good reform. Thanks for taking a
chance on it.

Hal Opperman
Medina, WA
425-635-0503