[FFML] Just a note on configuration

[John Campbell]

Sean Connor wrote:

> Agreed, but how much does the list's Reply-to policy have to do with
> that?  The list was largely isolated from the mainstream Internet for a
> very long time, and little new blood was coming on board.  Newcomers to
> the world of Internet fanfiction found it much easier to find places
> like fanficion.net, and thus never found their way here.  Meanwhile the
> old guard was subject to the attrition that naturally occurs with any
> Internet forum.

Quite a bit.  I've seen technical newsgroups die because of the "reply 
directly to sender/post results of query" policy.  You would see dozens 
of questions go by without any results simply because the person making 
the request had found out what he wanted to know and didn't bother to 
post the results to the group.

> If you want to know why the list is less active today, this is why.  The
> Reply-to setting, in all likelihood, has little or nothing to do with
> it.
> 
> Also, I encourage you to read:
> http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

I don't really care enough to make this a real argument, but that 
article was written in the 80's, even though it's been stamped 2002. 
You can tell by it's references and the tone of its arguments.

Times have changed since that article was written.  Today, I subscribe 
to a half dozen mailing lists and ffml was the only one that didn't use 
the Reply-to: header.  Every other list I subscribe to used to Reply-to 
header to route the replies to the list.

> There is something to that, and I think that the list would benefit from
> the admins becoming a bit more tolerant of offtopic chatter.  This seems
> to forment creativity among the authors on the list.
> 
> Separate issue from the reply-to thingy, though.

It would also benefit by having a web gateway so non-subscribers could 
find, and at least read the posts, if not directly participate.

Most of the technical lists I belong to are so heavily blogged that I 
end up seeing the same post thirty or forty times if I try to find 
something on Google.