Re: Policy on cross-posting to multiple lists

Greetings,

* Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 12:18 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> > Are there concerns about the BCC restriction?
>
> One thing people sometimes do when something is posted to the wrong
> list is (1) reply, (2) explain in the reply that the message was
> posted to the wrong pace, (3) move the original list from Cc into Bcc,
> and (4) add the correct list into Cc. That has the advantage that
> people on the original list can see that someone replied (which avoids
> duplicate replies by different people) and know where to go to find
> the rest of the discussion if they want to see it.

While considering that, we actively went and looked at both the
frequency and the success of that approach and, frankly, neither were
very inspiring. There were very few cases of that being tried and, as I
recall anyway, none of them were actually successful in 'moving' the
thread- that is, people continued on the original list to begin with
anyway, except that some of the thread was now on another list.

We had discussed allowing bcc's to lists when we detect that there's at
least *some* valid list in the To or Cc line, but it didn't seem
worthwhile given the research that was done.

For some (private) lists, we have the policy set to moderate emails
which bcc those lists (such as -security). Also, the "don't CC multiple
lists" was only applied to public/archived lists to begin with,
intentionally.

> I think the idea of allowing 2 lists but not >2 is probably a good
> one. Also, it might be good to be more permissive for, say, people
> who have successfully posted at least 1000 emails to the lists. Such
> people presumably are less likely to do abusive things, and more
> likely to care about and heed any correction given to them.

Yeah, that's in-line with what I had suggested up-thread where we have
some kind of flag which can either be set by the user themselves (maybe
we have some language above the flag that cautions against cross-posts
and whatnot), or set by the system (>1000 emails, as you say, or maybe
"after 2 weeks of being subscribed to a list", similar to the community
account "cooling off" period we have), or maybe by the list admins
(likely initially based on a heuristic of "lots of emails sent" or
something, but then handled on an individual basis).

I am a little concerned that we make the system too complicated for
people to understand too though. Haven't got a particularly good answer
for that, sadly.

Thanks!

Stephen