Greetings Gentle-sophonts,
It has been suggested (and argued) that the TML list should be split into
several splinter groups.
I think that both sides have stated their points of view:
1) The volume and noise/signal ratios of the current TML are too high for me.
2) What's a little volume, it's the contributions that matter, wade through the
cruft - the rest of us do.
Personally, I find myself falling into the first camp for various reasons, some
of which are technical and some of which are personal. Firstly, I receive the
nightly bundles, which is about all that I can handle at one sitting since I'm
saddled with a MUA that does _not_ automatically break the digests down into
individual messages for me. This same limitation in my MUA requires me to wade
through entire articles that I couldn't give a hoot about just to get to a
short posting that I _am_ interested in.
I think that James's suggestion of automatic, individualized digests would make
everyone happy, you get what you want to read, you can post to the relevant
sub-lists as needed, heck you can cross-post if it's relevant to more than one
group.
I don't think that requiring a special "tag" in the subject line is the proper
way to go about things, though. It makes much more sense to me (from a
technical point of view) to have separate mailing addresses for each of the
list, as well as separate "digestifiers" for each list. If you want to
cross-post then send the message to all of the lists that are (or might be)
concerned.
I might also include a list called "Traveller-general",(or somesuch) that would
(hopefully) have broad appeal. In the case of a cross-post to more than (say)
three sub-groups, the _actual_ message woud be posted to Traveller-general, and
only a short pointer message would be cross-posted to the others.
Yes, this scheme requires some thought in posting, but the poster _has_ to
realize that he/she's not only using up his/her own time, but the time of
countless others that may or may not have the same specific interests.
I think that it would be much more efficient in general to split the various
sub-groups out, require those that are interested to subscribe (or perhaps
subsribe them by default, and let them unsubsribe if they wish) than to
continue with the current high-volume mish-mash that we currently have.
As an aside, I probably will subscribe to any and all Traveller related mailing
lists that get created. The main advantage for me will be that I'll be able to
_concentrate_ on what _I'm_ most interested in, possibly skipping the other
stuff if I don't have the time for it at the moment.
I hope that the message above made sense, It's been a 12-hour day for me, and
I'm not done yet... :(
- --
[email removed]