Re: Policy for posts from non-members

[Andrew Bernard]

Oh come now people. :-) Gen XYZ people have to register to use Discord, 
and Facebook, and Reddit, and Twitter, almost all Discourse forums and 
more. Most employed people who work use email daily and countless people 
understand folders and filters. So email interfaces can't be unfamiliar 
to younger people and the act of subscribing is just entering a name and 
an email address and responding to confirmation emails.

Needless to worry about scaring people off. So far all the people who 
have been asked manually to subscribe appear to have done so without 
objection. Also, the aim of the game is not to attract the maximum 
number of members, but to offer community and support to genuine users 
and subscribers. If some people are scared off by these very minimal 
joining requirements then maybe they are not the sort of members you 
want on a list anyway, if such a simple thing is a stumbling block. Just 
exactly the sort of people no doubt we have to manually train 
repetitively to actually provide an MWE with their query, another 
laborious and time consuming task for list admins and members, even 
though this is mentioned and has a page on the website. You know what I 
mean.

On the Discourse servers that I run I have a policy page which explains 
policies like this in detail, so that it is plain to all comers and 
active subscribers. Although we are talking about a mailing list here, 
perhaps the lilypond.org site could have a page devoted to the 
principles and policies of the mailing list function. This page:

https://lilypond.org/contact.html

has only the bare minimum of contact information, with no policy, 
mailing list FAQ and so on made plain.

If people think an email list presents a barrier to people, I'm willing 
to offer to set up and host the list as a Discourse server, the modern 
way which has a superb web interface and also supports at the same time 
95% of the functions of a traditional email list for people who want 
that. Many companies use Discourse now for their forums, a notable 
example of which is Steinberg. Something I have been wanting to suggest 
for some time.

https://www.discourse.org/about

Open source and able to be self hosted. The policy I employ is that the 
Discourse server is open to the public for viewing and searching, 
available to bots for indexing, but you have to subscribe to post, in 
order to prevent spam. So far I have never had a complaint about this 
type of policy.

[Re Musescore, that may have been an offhand reference just to a random 
competing application but on the forum page it is stated: "Log in to 
post new content in the forum."

https://musescore.org/en/forum

]


Andrew


On 22/02/2023 9:38 pm, Lukas-Fabian Moser wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Lukas