[OT] Re: Tango heap is dangerous

[David Wilson]

[Pointing this at the discussion list again]

2008/10/16 Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a>:
> "David Wilson" <dw at botanicus.net> wrote in message
> news:mailman.142.1224175522.3087.digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com...
>> Would it be too much to ask for people to *stop* *having*
>> *conversations* on the *announce* group? :)
>
> Would it be too much to ask people to stop top-posting? ;)

While there are trivial technological solutions to rendering
top-posted e-mail efficiently (Gmail, ...), classifying natural
language text is still imperfect, and so we continue to manually
maintain the classifications ourselves in order to make sense of it
all...

>
> But anyway, I think it's pretty well understood that the announcements are
> just the top-level posts. Nobody's going to make an announcement further
> down the tree unless they don't want it to really be much of an
> "announcement".
>
> And it seems silly for something that starts on one group to
> suddenly switch over to a different group for its own discussion.

My understanding of every "-announce" list I've ever been subscribed
to is that they are used for announcements, apparently with the
exception of D's. Keeping this so doesn't have to be difficult; on
mailing lists I've seen people use the (shock) "Reply-To" or
"Mail-Followup-To" headers, and on Usenet "Followup-To".

Enforcing it is simply a case of assigning a moderator to the relevant group.

I'm not just being pedantic here. I have low volume groups like this
flowing into a single folder which is presently lighting up every day,
and as I rush to find out what new, or potentially important things
await, I'm saddened to discover it's just yet another conversation
about D that should be on a discussion list. This voids any benefit of
having a separate announce list to begin with.

It leaves me a single technological option for returning my folder to
a normative state: unsubscribing. While I'm not going to do that,
there are others who may, those with less free time to read dhasenan's
latest moans about Tango, etc., who may take from it a negative
impression of the community and ultimately of the language, and for a
small language that is an undesirable lost chance at free evangelism.

Apologies for the rant, but this minor lack of adherence to netiquette
is damaging my work flow. :)


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