[Election-Methods] [EM] Archives are now private ?

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 06:09 AM 7/24/2007, raphfrk at netscape.net wrote:
>Was there any particular reason for this change ?  Perhaps a change 
>of policy with respect to the discussions.
>
>Also, the link from electrorama wiki is now a broken link.

Notice that the list tag changed. Looks like admin has been monkeying 
around with settings on the list.

Let me suggest this as a long-time list manager: don't make 
unnecessary changes without asking the members. There can be 
unintended consequences. Sometimes you gotta do it, but....

I noted in another post that changing the list tag screws up my 
filters, which are used in Mailwasher to protect list mail from the 
spam filtering, and in my mail program to sort mail. I noticed that 
the tag had changed because suddenly some of the list mail was ending 
up in my In box instead of my EM mailbox. Some was still going into 
the EM folder because the filter looks for EM in the subject header. 
I filter maybe thirty lists that way.

And changing the tag has another consequence. Not only is the longer 
tag going to mean that less of the subject information is visible in 
lists of the mail of a certain field width, but mail can't now be 
sorted properly by Subject where the tag has changed. Notice that 
lots of current posts have both [Election-Methods] and [EM] in them. 
Eudora, for example, threads mail properly, in general, where the 
subject headers have been left intact. It gets confused with Antwort 
and other response tags.... it's a place where having a standard 
would be nice, and Re is short and sweet. So who used RE:??

This kind of list tag is commonly created by inexperienced list 
managers, in my experience, sometimes even longer names are used. 
Look at very large lists, with very experienced managers, the tag is 
short and sweet. For example, the Email List Manager's list on 
Yahoogroups has a tag of [EL-M].

Quite close to EM, to be sure, but different. And most people don't 
subscribe to so many lists that collisions of short acronyms are a 
problem. In the rare case that a collision occurs, there are other 
options for filters, the list tag is just a very convenient and quick 
way to do it.