--On Tuesday, September 28, 2021 09:05 +1300 Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Lars, > On 27-Sep-21 22:10, Lars Eggert wrote: > ... >>> 2. Make it opt-out for meeting registrants. Ideally, it >>> would also be opt-out for anyone who subscribes to any IETF >>> list whatever, but I don't know if that's practicable. >> >> I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by "make it >> opt-out" - do you mean "subscribe by default"? > > I mean that on the web page where one signs up for the > datatracker, or registers for a meeting, there should be a > *pre-ticked* box for "Join the XXX@xxxxxxxx mailing list". In > fact, a list would be even better; thinking out loud: > > [/] important@xxxxxxxx -- important IETF announcements > [/] ietf-announce@xxxxxxxx -- general IETF announcements > [/] ietf@xxxxxxxx -- general discussion list > [/] agenda-announce -- meeting announcements of all kinds > [/] last-call -- IETF-wide document last calls > [/] I-D-annnounce -- Internet Draft announcements > [/] rfc-announce -- RFC announcements > [/] datatracker -- general data tracker announcements > > and maybe one or two more. > > And set "no duplicates" in mailman for all announcement lists. Brian, Whether opt-out or opt-in, such a list invites people to get only the information they think they need and would mitigate against finding out about (not necessarily tracking) things that might be of interest, even within an Area or part of an Area. Once one starts un-checking boxes, it is mechanically and psychologically really easy to check many of them. In addition, for those of us who do considerable local filtering or message routing based on the list used and sometimes parts of the Subject line, having Mailman apply "no duplicates" is a truly horrendous idea, especially if we don't want to make a trip to the bikeshed to discuss which list is preferred if a message is posted to several of them and the particular user is subscribed to all or those or a subset. If we think the above are discrete categories and people should be able to decide which to subscribe to [1], then any announcement messages should go to at most one of those lists and people who want to get that type of announcement should subscribe. FWIW, agenda-announce is an interesting case that illustrates the problem. If I'm only interested in meeting announcements in an Area or two (plus IETF-wide ones or not), it doesn't help me at all. To allow me to control that, I would need IETF-meeting-announce ART-meeting-announce GEN-meeting-announce INT-meeting-announce etc. Or to carry that argument in the direction of the ridiculous, it might be reasonable for me to want to follow the meeting announcements and Last Calls from particular WGs while not participating actively in their mailing list. For a hypothetical Foo WG, that might mean, instead of ietf-foo@xxxxxxxx, Foo-meeting-announce Foo-last-call-announce Foo-discuss while today, all of those are lumped together, with what would be the first two copied to the third.... just like your list above is all copied to/ merged into ietf-announce. Conclusion: It is unlikely that one can tailor lists that provide the right information, with no noise, to many IETF participants. If we want to help, we should put more energy into trying to make it efficient for participants to read things they are interested in and discard (manually or automatically) the rest with minimal fuss. But I think that has been said before in other ways. best, john [1] My guess is that the categories are not as discrete as we would like and that there will be edge cases... perhaps another reason to not go down the "many list" plan or, if we must, to not go very far down it.
