Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2019 12:18:35 -0500
From: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
To: Dean Rasheed <dean.a.rasheed@gmail.com>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-www@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Policy on cross-posting to multiple lists
Message-ID: <20190110171835.GP2528@tamriel.snowman.net>
References: 
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Greetings,

(moving to -www as suggested downthread and as generally more
appropriate)

* Dean Rasheed (dean.a.rasheed@gmail.com) wrote:
> Has the policy on cross-posting to multiple lists been hardened recently?

So, the short answer is 'yes'.

We've made a few different changes in the recent weeks.  The first
change that was made was actually to start dropping emails where the
list is being BCC'd.  That was done a couple of weeks ago and seems to
have gone well and has reduced the amount of spam our moderators are
dealing with.

This most recent change was to implement a policy where we don't allow
public lists to be CC'd with other public lists; when that happens we
instead reply with an email basically saying "please pick the right list
to send your email to."

Perhaps that hasn't been getting through to people...?  Though I had
someone respond to -owner basically saying "thanks, I'll pick the right
list", so at least some are seeing it.

As for how this change came to be implemented without much discussion
externally, I'm afraid that's probably the combination of "well, the BCC
change went just fine and no one complained", confusion between folks on
infra as to if we had only discussed it internally or if we had already
discussed it externally with people (the individual who actually made
the change *cough* apparently thought it had already been discussed
externally when we hadn't and probably should have at least announced
it when we did make the change anyway...), and general frustration among
some about the increasing number of cross-post emails we're getting
which really shouldn't be cross-posted.

In an ideal world, everyone would know that they really *shouldn't*
cross-post, and we also wouldn't have extremely long many-mailing-list
cross-posted threads, and we wouldn't need to have such a policy, but
that's not really where we are.

One thing which hadn't been considered and probably should have is the
impact on existing threads, but I'm not sure if we really could have
sensibly done something about that.

Then there's the big question which we really should have discussed
ahead of time, but, do people feel that such a restriction ends up doing
more harm than good?  Are there concerns about the BCC restriction?  In
the short period of time that it's been in place, I've seen some good
come from it in the form of people learning to post to the correct list
instead of just cross-posting to a bunch of lists, but I've also seen
(now) the cases where existing threads were confused do to the change,
so I suppose I'm on the fence, though I still tend towards having the
policy in place and hoping that it doesn't overly bother existing users
while helping newcomers.

We're here now though, so, thoughts?  Should I go undo it right away?
Should we see how it goes?  Try other things?  We could possibly have it
only apply to emails from people who don't have accounts or who aren't
subscribed to the lists?  Or have a flag on a per-account basis which
basically says "let me cross-post"?  Open to suggestions (note: I've not
run all the above ideas by the other pglister hacker *cough*, so I can't
say if all of them would be possible/reasonable, just throwing out
ideas).

Thanks!

Stephen

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