[NCUC E-team] Mailing lists

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Jan 20 16:10, Avri Doria (avri at acm.org) wrote:

> I think the issue of allowing people to comment directly to archived
> lists is as much a policy as a practical issue. It is the sort of
> thing that the Ec could make a recommendation on, e.g establishing
> guidelines that empower the coordinators to only pass on messages
> that are on topic for the list.

Yes. Appropriate policy here depends on the nature of the list, as
well as practical considerations (e.g., a heavy spam attack may make
even moderation impossibly burdensome, so I'd want to be able to
switch the rule to "discard" at lest temporarily).
And the coordinator would be natural choice for deciding this.

> One other advantage is that so often an issue being discussed on a
> list includes another person for a short time. The moderate option
> allows them to participate as if on the list for that subject
> (assuming they are CC'ed on messages people send).

Yes. That way the lists could be used as team contact addresses
instead of the coordinators' personal addresses, which is useful for
several reasons (backup moderator could handle things when the
coordinator is temporarily unavailable, and such contacts would
be archived).

> I think having the coordinator, and maybe one other,  moderate is good.

Yes, especially if such outsider participation becomes even moderately
common. If it's a once-in-a-blue-moon event, it doesn't matter so much.

In time we (or the EC) can work out a proper policy for the purpose,
but initially we can handle it by ourselves (= me and one or two
backups for when I'm hiking in the wilderness or whatever),
and if it becomes too frequent on some list we can then tell
the coordinator to take it on.

> BTW, can you set me up to send from either acm.org or ella.com, but
> receive on only acm.org? thanks.

Yes, actually I did that already after you first posted from ella.
If anybody else ever wants to use multiple addresses they can
be added just as easily.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen