Hello! As I am new to this list, and did not succeed in getting a readable index to the archives, some of the questions here may be answered there, please feel free to reply privately with references to documents I should GET, and things that everyone already knows. As a member of several lists which span professionals to second-career and amateur subscribers, and as an activist, I am often trying to help our lists work more effectively for their members. Some of the problems which must face all list owners are kooks and others who want a megaphone and who will not stop, private mail which does not belong on the list, and general noise. We also must support hard-working list owners and moderators, some of whom are comfortable moderating everything, some a little, and some none at all. One of the most productive solutions is the recognition that in these situations we have multiple audiences, not all of whom want to be in the same conversations with each other. Here I have a combination of a number of questions, suggestions, and solutions which either have been tried or which I would like pointers on, or which I would like the new release of ListServ software to address, if that is possible. If we can keep uppermost the principle that it is the subscribers right to CHOOSE what to receive or not receive, we can greatly improve how customers are served. *** 1. The goal of this request is to minimize unwanted replies to more than the sender intended. By setting defaults so that predictable common errors will have the minimum consequences, ones which can be easily remedied if they were not right, rather than the maximum consequences which cannot be remedied. A private message sent to a large email list cannot be remedied, and is a worse error, than a message intended for an email list which was sent only to an individual. The second is easily remedied, but is often preferable to the community as a whole. Because of this asymmetry, message senders should have to take an intentional action to send to a large list rather than to just one recipient, since the large mailing is a burden on more people. And above all, those receiving messages should have an easy CHOICE whether to reply only to the originator or to an entire email list. Currently they often do not. Could the designers of ListServ software please set the defaults to maximize the number of existing email programs which will respect the DIFFERENCE between "reply to sender" and "reply to all" in the case of email lists, recognizing that the "sender" which users of ordinary English normally intend is the single Originator, not the email list as sender. There is of course a three-way distinction in principle, between the Originator of the message, the Sender (which can be an individual, or technically but not in ordinary English, an email list), and All (since a message can be sent to a combination of individuals and email lists, this is distinct from either). As the situation now stands, users such as those on AOL who have a "reply to sender" and a "reply to all" do not actually have a choice, when an email list gives itself as "sender". They either reply to the email list (the effect of reply-to-sender), or to the email list and also any other individuals or lists which were listed as addressees of the same message. This last situation is rather rare to say the least. The obvious choice is the one they do NOT currently have, that is, to reply to either the individual Originator (using reply-to-sender) or to the entire email list (using reply-to-all). The failure of this choice causes numerous private messages to go to entire lists, burdening everyone. Even list users with years of experience do this, which is what shows that the ergonomics of the software do not yet fit ordinary people's behavior. *** 2. For those who use Topics, it is important to make them both easy for subscribers and easy for a list owner or moderator to fix the topic designations only when necessary, and not to have to look at messages which are alrady properly marked for an existing topic. a) Currently messages whose subject lines are not marked for an existing topic go by default into OT(her). Could it be made possible for these to be sent to the moderator instead? Can the Validation or other facility do this? If not, as it stands, we can achieve something similar by using one additional Topic cateogory, call it UNCL(assified) for now, have no subscribers receive the OT(her) topic area except the moderator, and then the moderator can send messages into the appropriate topic area if they are not already so marked. The moderator will not have to look at messages which are properly marked. b) Can the Validation or other facility respond to an incoming message not marked for topic by returning the message to the sender, (preferably not with any quotes added), prefaced or accompanied by a reminder message that they need to specify an existing topic, and a list of the topic abbreviations? c) Can the Validation or other facility co-ordinate topic areas with subscribers, permitting certain subscribers to post only to certain topic areas? *** 3. Can the number of possible Topic areas be increased beyond 10? (OT(her) and ALL are currently included in those 10) *** 4. Can it be made possible to have an abbreviation other than the list name appear at the head of each subject line, when setting SUBJecthdr ? The reason is that long list names eat up the very limited space available for viewing message titles, in many email programs. These SUBJecthdrs are very important to people who subscribe to several email lists, in keeping their email organized. A two-or-three-letter abbreviation without brackets would be nice. Can it be made possible to have SHORT headers combined with SUBJecthdr ? The amount of routing information at the ends of messages these days is a substantial burden, almost never used by most receivers. (It can be retrieved separately if desired.) *** 5. Can it be made possible to filter subject lines so that if there is one "Re:" or one [SUBJecthdr], a second or third one cannot be introduced through successive replies? Such a sequence leads to a subject line with no content information at all visible in a limited width. [This last request may not be relevant to ListServ, it may be relevant to some other email list management programs.] *** Thanks to anyone for assistance. Again, please reply privately unless this is of interest to the whole list, which I cannot judge since I am new to this list. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics PO Box 15156 Washington, DC 20003 <[log in to unmask]> Phone (202) 547-7678