Re: Reply to list [was: Different key maps in different dired buffers]

[Bob Proulx]

Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:
> Bob Proulx writes:
> > That is the problem.  It is available.  People will use it.  We can't
> > stop people from posting to the news group.
> 
> Well, being a listmaster, actually, you could, I guess.  I am not
> familiar with GNU Mailman, but there must be sophisticated filtering
> features.  But that would be too radical solution, of course.

I am sure you have heard the wisdom, "With great power comes great
responsibility."  I take that very seriously and try very hard not to
abuse positions of responsibility.  I would see unilaterally breaking
off the newsgroup from the mailing list where it has been working for
many years to be an abuse of that trust.

As to your comment about Mailman having sophisticated filtering,
actually no it doesn't.  Mailman is actually pretty simple in terms of
available features.  But it is sufficient.  Just barely.

> Instead, I imagined, sending to anyone who posts via Usenet an
> auto-reply mail that explains the problem and advises switching to Gmane
> might be feasible as a temporary measure.

That would potentially create a lot of backscatter spam.  Not good.
Let's not do it.

And for the people who solely use usenet the newsgroups appear to them
to be the primary interface.  It is completely symetrical and depends
upon your point of view.

> I’ve started to dig through GNU Mailman’s documentation (which seems to
> be not ready yet) to find something about auto-responder and ran across
> a note that Mailman has NNTP support on its own.

AFAIK Mailman 2 does not have NNTP support.  Are you reading about
Mailman 3 perhaps?  I doubt there will be a migration to 3 anytime
soon.  The FSF would need to do it and everything about it is
different.  It would be large undertaking and time resources are not
available for it.

> Then I’ve searched the Web a bit and found a page [0] which hints, that
> usenet.stanford.org was blamed unfairly — it is a mere Usenet server,
> while mail-to-news gating is done here, on gnu.org.
> 
> [0] https://www.gnu.org/usenet/usenet.html
> 
> Is that page still actual?

Hmm...  Very interesting.  That is very possible.  And since it is
documented there I think very likely!  But I think anyone who ever had
anything to do with it has retired from the project.  We will need to
re-learn it.  I will kick that over to the FSF admins and see what
they say about it.

Bob