[tlug] Netcops, lighten up! [was: Job Offer]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

An open letter to Mr. Paul:

I do not speak for list administrators.  I do not hold an official
position in TLUG.  Nonetheless, people tend to listen to me. :-)

If you don't understand what has just happened, but would like to
occasionally recruit on TLUG and other open source channels, I
recommend the book by Goldman and Gabriel, "Innovation Happens
Elsewhere", especially Ch. 5 and 8, which explains how business can
effectively cooperate with the cantankerous community of open source
(including Linux).  You should also take a look at a guide to
"Netiquette", available in several places on the Web; much of
Netiquette is genuine "best practice", some of it is quite arbitrary,
but all of it is valued and (sometimes fiercely) defended by our
community.  These customs differ substantially in several respects
from those common is the general business community.  Since you are
the newcomer, you are expected to adapt, or you will lose face.
(Please forgive my lecture if you know this already, but simply made a
mistake.)

[Aside to TLUG: the Goldman and Gabriel book is excellent, showing how
Sun and other leading businesses have successfully learned to work
with open source and the open source community.  Highly recommended if
you're interested in free software business practices.]

>>>>> "Godwin" == Godwin Stewart <godwin.stewart@example.com> writes:

    Godwin> Very nice.

    Godwin> What does this have to do with auto-shutting down machines
    Godwin> at a certain temperature?

[Aside to Godwin: Please use the "personal reply" function, and
explain what you are talking about, rather than simply flaming someone
who probably was completely unaware of the problem, and did his best
to be as polite as he could be.  I'll do it for you, this time, since
I wanted to advertise the Goldman and Gabriel book. :-]

Repeating the well-known facts for your benefit (and Mr. Stibbe's):

There are two ways to collect messages by topic.  One is to sort them
by the Subject header, which is normally visible in your mail client.
This is prone to be inaccurate for several reasons, however, and
modern mail clients add links to previous messages in the "thread",
using the "In-Reply-To" and "References" headers.

These are normally not displayed by your mail client, during
composition or reading, but "threading" through these pointers is a
very accurate way to follow the discussion.  This benefit is lost if a
third party replies to a message without responding to that message's
content in any way, a practice called "thread hijacking".  It is
disconcerting to even the most tolerant reader, and very annoying to
someone who is following the particular thread but otherwise
uninterested in the list traffic.[1]  Your post was a typical example
of thread hijacking, despite Mr. Stibbe's defense.

As far as I can tell, your post is otherwise within the list
guidelines, although I expected an explicit statement that you checked
with the admins before posting.  Except for the minor matter of the
thread hijack.  [Aside: Which is indeed *minor*, Godwin: it would have
been a one post interruption in the thread, which you doubled merely
by posting, and then redoubled by provoking and participating in a
flamewar.]

Again as far as I can tell, the bigger problem is that TLUG fails to
conform to best current practices, and adds a Reply-To to itself.
This causes many mail clients to direct all responses to TLUG.  If
it did not, this kind of situation would much more rarely happen.
People could do a reply to all and clean out extraneous addressees,
but cutting and pasting only the list address is typically less work.

Sincerely yours,
Stephen Turnbull


Footnotes: 
[1]  On a list where careful attention to threading is the norm, I
will sometimes suppress the Summary listing to get more space for the
article window.  Thus I am entirely dependent on correct threading to
avoid interruptions.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.