[Balug-Admin] simpler approach: (just) talk and admin?

[Michael Paoli]

Unfortunately that ends up not working so well.

Most notably, when the "talk" list gets quite hopping (which does
and has happened, and can happen again at any time),
* lots of folks drop from the "talk" list due to volume, or change to
  getting it in digested form
* lots of folks miss noting important BALUG announcements - as they'd
  be mixed in with lots of other "talk" e-mail (or worse yet, be just
  one part of someone large daily digest of BALUG "talk" e-mails
  combined into a single e-mail).
* many folks *do* want the high-level important announcements, but
  don't want all that other "talk" traffic, and only want a quite low
  volume of e-mails from BALUG (like one to a few e-mails per month
  maximum).
* many BALUG folks tend to forget about specific BALUG meeting dates
  and/or don't generally look at the BALUG web pages for the latest
  details about upcoming meetings, and primarily rely upon the
  "announce" (or other) e-mails to remind them of when the next BALUG
  meeting is (and if the talk/presentation is or may be of particular
  interest to them).

If I recall correctly, it was more-or-less out of exactly those
factors, and persons requests and suggestions, that the "announce"
list came into existence (and the last of those reasons which also
tends to favor its continuing to exist).

About the only downside to separate "talk" and "announce" lists - at
least as presently implemented - we don't have any particularly simple
means of ensuring that everyone on the "talk" (and "admin") list(s) is
also subscribed to "announce".  There are alternative approaches to
that, however.  One approach is have "talk" subscribed to "announce",
and then remove from "announce" those that are subscribed to "talk"
... but having a list subscribed to a list tends to cause its own
sets of issues/problems (we probably wouldn't want to do that without
well testing it out and making sure we had any serious issues
reasonably addressed).  Another approach that works for some, is 
requiring some key word or string on the Subject header for the 
"announcement" items - but that tends to push the burden of filtering
to easily pick out the most important items to the users (or their
clients) - and since "talk" is unmoderated, there's also nothing
preventing any subscriber from tossing in such trigger strings on
any message they send to the list.

Longer term, we should probably further investigate having "talk" 
subscribed to "announce" ... that would be a relatively clean method -
particularly if we also augment that with some automation (e.g. 
periodically and automatically remove from "announce" e-mail addresses 
that show up there that area also on "talk").  That's likely also much
more feasible to implement once we're fully migrated off of 
DreamHost.com.

>     i like a simpler approach: talk and admin
> with maybe a couple of specialized, ad hoc
> lists.
> 
> On Sep 3, 2007, at 10:56 AM, Michael Paoli wrote:
> 
> > list subscribers (does include also those with delivery disabled):
> > $ wc -l */memb*`date -I`
> >    27 balug-admin/membership_2007-09-03
> >   264 balug-announce/membership_2007-09-03
> >   258 balug-talk/membership_2007-09-03