On 1/5/21 7:05 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
I think the same could be said about decisions that are made on obscure mailing lists -- many developers refuse to subscribe to them now because of their awful usability problems.
Not sure what you mean by "obscure", but I believe that IETF may
have too many mailing lists, with a bad habit of (whether
deliberately or not) squelching difficult discussions by spinning
up more and more lists that people have to then subscribe to and
follow.
Also not sure which "awful usability problems" you're referring
to, because some people seem to think that even using email at all
(and sifting through the spam and the scams and the automatically
generated messages from other tools, and perhaps also just reading
traffic from other contributors) are impositions. But I will
certainly agree that having to subscribe to lots of new mailing
lists makes for a poor user interface.
Keith
p.s. 20+ ago I decided to subscribe to each IETF list using a
unique email address so that I could route each list's traffic to
its own subfolder. But after IETF lists started to "moderate"
messages from non-subscribers, I had to either change my From
address for each list (which I didn't want to do because I wanted
that address to be used only for list traffic and not private
replies), or subscribe twice to each list, once using the unique
address and another time (with email turned off) from my usual
email address.
I now think that it might have been a mistake to put each list in
a separate folder, because it seems to be more difficult to keep
up with multiple lists that way. This might be because the
number of folders is more than will fit in the height of a
full-screen window, and I haven't found a mail user agent that
lets me effectively keep track of not only which folders have new
messages, but which folders haven't been read in awhile. (MUA
user interfaces seem to have stagnated in the late 1990s, with
many products actually getting worse since then.)
I've tried using the IMAP interface to read multiple lists without having to subscribe to them, but after investing multiple hours on multiple occasions, never got it to work well.
Vaguely speaking I get the impression that we're often drowning
in "solutions" (not just in IETF), and what we need might not be more
solutions so much as simpler ones.
