RE: [chairs] TC mailing list guidelines

["Karl F. Best" <karl.best@oasis-open.org>]

James:

The only reason I've required subscriptions to these lists is to keep
the spam out. We're been hit *hard* by bots collecting email addresses
from our site, and any of the lists that I've opened even for a short
period of time to non-subscribers gets hit with spam.

I note that you're not volunteering to moderate a public
comment/discussion list for your TC. Neither am I. If you can find
someone to moderate it I'll open it up. Otherwise we'll have to require
subscriptions.

</karl>
=================================================================
Karl F. Best
OASIS - Director, Technical Operations
+1 978.667.5115 x206
karl.best@oasis-open.org  http://www.oasis-open.org


> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Clark [mailto:jjc@jclark.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 8:08 PM
> To: chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [chairs] TC mailing list guidelines
>
>
> I wonder whether I am alone in finding the current OASIS
> guidelines on TC
> mailing lists to be unsatisfactory.  The current guidelines are at
>
>   http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/guidelines.shtml#maillist
>
> What I find unsatisfactory is the way public mailing lists
> are handled.
> The guidelines recommend a single public mailing list named
> *-comment for
> "general public discussion of the TC work", which anybody can
> subscribe to,
> but only subcribers can post to.  I have two problems with this:
>
> 1. It's misleading and confusing to call it a comment list
> when it's really
> a discussion list.
>
> 2. There ought to be a way for people to submit comments on
> specs without
> subscribing to a mailing list.
>
> The RELAX NG specs say that comments should be sent to the
> RELAX NG comment
> mailing list.  I regularly get complaints from people who try
> to submit
> comments but get their message bounced because they are not
> subscribers.
> People expect the *-comment lists to work like the W3C
> *-comment lists,
> where anybody can post without subcription.
>
> We should not be erecting barriers that make it inconvenient
> for people to
> submit comments on our specifications.  The kind of people we
> particularly
> want to get comments from are typically overwhelmed with
> email already and
> are reluctant to subscribe to a mailing list just to submit a comment.
>
> I believe it is very important that there should be *-comment
> lists that
> anybody can post to.  It is highly desirable that such lists are
> spam-filtered either by software or by human (no, I'm not
> volunteering!).
> These should be open to subscription only by TC members.
> Typically the
> chair would appoint a TC member to monitor the comment lists
> and collate
> comments for TC consideration. I would also be in favour of
> having a public
> discussion list appropriately named.
>
> James
>
>
>
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