latest apologies for personal posting

[Randolph J. Herber]

The following header lines retained to affect attribution:
|Date: Tue, 20 Feb 1996 22:47:09 +0200
|From: Kjetil Raa Hauge <K.R.Hauge at easteur-orient.uio.no>
|Subject: Re: latest apologies for personal posting

|>|Heh, heh. The SEELANGS demon strikes again. Does anyone feel the need for
|>|a moderated list? Someday someone is gonna say something they're really
|>|gonna regret.

|>|Ernest Scatton                                       Germanic & Slavic Hum254

|>A simplier solution is to set the reply address to the reply address of the
|>poster and not the reply address of the mailing list as a whole.  I would
|>prefer that it were set that way.

|>Randolph J. Herber, herber at dcdrjh.fnal.gov, +1 708 840 2966, CD/HQ CDF-PK-149O

|What makes you believe that with a setup like that, the people who now post
|personal replies to the list would not be sending off their intended list
|postings as personal mail only? The informational value of the list, as
|well as its entertainment value, would be greatly diminished.

|-- Kjetil Raa Hauge, U. of Oslo. Phone +47/22856710, fax +47/22854140

The following header lines retained to affect attribution:
=Date: Tue, 20 Feb 1996 16:52:21 -0500
=From: "Loren A. Billings" <billings at mailer.fsu.edu>
=Subject: Second Herber's motion

=I second Randolph Herber's motion.  I know it's possible to re-set the
=LISTSERV setup in order to change the default reply address.  Ever since
=switching to the unix system at Florida State, it's been very difficult to
=determine who I'm replying to.  The menu shows the original poster's name,
=but the reply goes back to all of SEELangs.  I agree that having a
=moderator isn't the problem; I like being able to post a query on
=Saturday afternoon and get three replies within the hour, something that
=wouldn't happen if the moderator weren't on duty then.

=Best,  --Loren (billings at mailer.fsu.edu)i

Dear Kjetil Raa Hauge,

I offer the following:

1. I make far more private responses to postings than I make public replies.

2. A public posting that becomes unintentionally a private electronic mail
   response causes no damage or embarrassment since you had intended that
   member among others to receive the message.  Conversely, a private
   electronic mail response that unintentionally becomes public can be
   quite damaging or embarrassing to any or all of the sender, the intended
   receipent or some third party..

3. I either know or have readily at hand the electronic mail address to
   post an item to the mailing list.  I very frequently do not have the
   same knowlege or access to the electronic mailing address of the poster
   of the message to which I am responding.  Therefore, for I and for many
   others, it is more convenient that the reply address be that of the
   poster of the item rather than the submission address of the mailing list.

4. To borrow a phrase from Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, ``I am not
   amused'' when someone is publically damaged or embarrassed by an
   unintentional posting.

5. During my year and a half of being the electronic postmaster at Fermi
   National Accelerator Laboratory, I received far more complaints about
   FNAL people unintentionally posting private messages to a mailing list
   than I received requests for determining how one posted to a mailing
   that were set so that replies went only to the poster of an item.

Randolph J. Herber, herber at dcdrjh.fnal.gov, +1 708 840 2966, CD/HQ CDF-PK-149O
(Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.)
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