Re: Policy for posts from non-members

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le mercredi 22 février 2023 à 11:38 +0100, Lukas-Fabian Moser a écrit :

I'm a bit late to the party, but nevertheless: I think I'm with Wol and
Werner (and David K.?) here.

Replying after 12 hours is not late to the party :-)

Of course, considering the unbelievable number of things you're
contributing to LilyPond as a whole, you're perfectly free to design
things in a fashion that is least cumbersome to you.

But I'm afraid a message like the one you proposed (although its wording
is perfectly friendly and polite) will turn new users away, who just
might say: Don't bother, I'll stick to MuseScore then. Mailing lists are
old, yes (like Andrew said), but this does not mean that by now,
everybody should be accustomed to them: It could just as well mean (and
I think it does) that younger people are not acquainted with them anymore.

Yes, that is the case. (My first interaction with a LilyPond list 4 years ago was a little puzzling, as I didn't know about mailing lists before. To be precise, I really hesitated before posting, because I saw the "lilypond-user-fr@gnu.org" address at the bottom of "lilypond --help" but without understanding at first that I could see the past posts to that list. Also, the fact that there is an active Facebook group for LilyPond help, while Facebook is not adapted to that at all [in addition to the privacy evil] makes me think that the people there might not be comfortable using a mailing list.)

So, I think a better solution would be to keep things as they are, but
let non-subscribed users automatically (if that's possible!) receive an
e-mail saying:

• welcome
• you're not subscribed, so it might take longer until you get an
  answer, as your message has to be approved manually
• also, you might not see answers given to you, if somebody who helps
  you doesn't "reply to all" but sends his reply to the user list only.
• so you might just consider subscribing to the list, which you can do
  here: [link]

I don't think that this is would be a moral problem in the sense of a
canned reply disguised as a human interaction. It would keep your
moderation task to a mere minimum (namely, approving the message), but
without giving the new users the feeling that their message has actually
been rejected.

I've said this already, and I'm happy to say this again: To me, the
LilyPond community is likely the most friendly, helpful place I've ever
encountered on "the internet". We shouldn't erect too high a barrier to
entering it, and for people who are not familiar (e.g.) with automatic
e-mail filtering/sorting rules etc., I think subscribing to an e-mail
list does look like a barrier: We should advertise doing it, but not
force people contacting us for the first time to do it.

So you want to keep the possibility to post while not being subscribed, but make the messages that I'm manually sending now be sent automatically?

At first, I thought this wasn't possible, but it actually appears possible (the configuration for the held message notice text is just in a completely different place than the configuration for the rejection notice text in the Mailman 2 UI...). That would be fine with me as well. Mark, WDYT?

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