🚀 go-pugleaf

I sent this message to gnu-misc-discuss a couple of weeks ago, but never saw
it turn up in gnu.misc.discuss, and never heard from anybody, so I'm
reposting. Sorry if this is a repeat.


I've seen many complaints about people posting to the gnu.* newsgroups
instead of mailing to the gnu mailing lists. At our site, nearly everyone
interested in GNU/FSF reads the gnu.* newsgroups - very few people get any
of the mailing lists, so it's not surprising that we either forget or don't
know the mailing list addresses. (I'm guilty myself.)

I have three ideas for improving the situation, in order of (my) preference.

    1. Why not moderate the gnu.* newsgroups (at least officially)? I
    thought one of the features of the News software (correct me if I'm
    wrong) was that messages posted to moderated newsgroups were
    automatically mailed to the moderator. Couldn't the moderator's address
    just be the mailing list address?

    2. If 1. isn't possible, could the posting program be coerced to add a
    header field (maybe Followup-To, or X-List-Address, or ...) to each
    message that indicates the proper address to which postings should be
    mailed?

    3. There are 17 GNU mailing list/newsgroups.  There's no regular naming
    scheme for the mailing lists, so there's no hope that people reading the
    gnu.* groups can convert from newsgroup name to mailing list name
    without a crib sheet. Not all gnu.* newsgroups appear to have mailing
    lists (gnu.config comes to mind.)  The mailing lists aren't all hosted
    on the same machine either. Why not create a set of mailing list
    reflectors, all on a single machine, with names derived directly from
    the newsgroups (e.g. gnu.utils.bug -> gnu-utils-bug@std.address)?  The
    reflectors could simply forward all incoming mail to the real mailing
    lists.

Skip Montanaro (montanaro@sprite.crd.ge.com)