Mailing List Netiquette Enforcement Via Software?

Rob Kaper asks: "While administrating various e-mail mailing lists (with ezmlm), I noticed that most users lack an understanding of Netiquette. For example, they send their reply above the original, while quoting the entire original message. I could of course tighten the list policies and kick off offenders, but that would be a rather harsh solution. Is there software available that enforces or stimulates obedience of the Netiquette guidelines? (for example mailing list software that reformats ugly replies, converts HTML to plain text or bounces such e-mails)" Such programs would be useful to mailing-list maintainers who have bandwidth quotas. Any clues?

Comments

The Human Element

[AdamJ]

I've run several fairly high traffic mailing lists for going on four years now, and while I've never looked into automated features to help out newbies, I've never really thought they were needed.

First of all, every single list needs a FAQ, or if the amount of specifics for each list is small enough, you need a global FAQ for all the lists. At the very least, this FAQ needs to contain:

* the name of the list
* who's running it
* the purpose of the list
* the amount of email that you can expect to get on it (Some people don't realize that a busy mailing list can easily hit 100+ messages a day)
* the web address to unsubscribe and subscribe if your mailing list software supports it
* the email commands to unsubscribe, subscribe, set yourself to digest, nomail, etc.
* a brief description of those features.

And, finally, the biggie:

* Expected posting guidelines. Don't scrimp on these. You'll always have some user who thinks that they have the right to free speech everywhere and that they don't have to play by the rules, and the better your posting guidelines are the easier it is to say "Sorry kid, go play on Usenet" and unsubscribe him.

(Anyone who has run a mailing list understands this type of user.)

Sample posting guidelines for the lists I run:

* Place your replies below the text you're quoting, snip irrelevant text, make sure you correctly attribute the people you're responding to.
* No HTML, attachements, vcards, or anything but pure straight text.
* Don't flame, post anything illegal, spam, harass other list members, and try to keep stuff On Topic.

Keeping stuff On Topic is another side note - it's hard to do, and nobody wants to watch email all day and bitch at people for being OT or not. We've had good success asking people to prefix posts that they KNOW are off topic with the [OT] tag. People who have absolutely no desire to read off topic stuff can then filter it out.

Also, clearly lay out what the punishments are for violations. We use a three strikes rule - you get two personal warnings, and on the third you get removed from the list. You're allowed to resubscribe, but if you violate again we'll ask you not to resubscribe for a length of time.

We've only ever had to block one person from acessing our lists once in my four years with them, and I believe once before I started working with them too. Not a bad record for 7 years...

Now, to get to the subject of my post - The Human Element.

The lists we run always have two main Admins - The Fearless Leader and the Assistant Fearless Leader. From there we add another people as neede d - we have someone who maintains the FAQs and the website that they're on, and on one of the lists we have someone who maintains a Newbies Guide (Said list is an Interactive Fiction list, and has strict guidelines so such a guide is necessary).

For the busiest list we have what we call GridSec, or without the "themed" term, Flunkies. :)

These people do the day to day job of scanning the list for posting violations or users having problems, sending our warnings, and keeping the senior Admins abreast of any problems. Personally I don't really have time now to read each and every post to the list, so having these guys around is a great big help. We had an "Open Call" for applications to be one, and ended up picking 3 people from different parts of the planet - this means we can safely sleep while we know the Euro based flunky can keep his eye on things. ;)

Also, it's best to pick people who have been on the list a decent length of time, and who contribute positively - that way it's more likely that the people on the other end are going to listen to them and understand that they're not trying to be jerks, but they're trying to keep the list flowing smoothly.

I've probably forgotten a few things (Long posts first thing in the morning ;), so if you have questions, feel free. :-)

Adam

More on the subject

[Rob Kaper]

The most relevant list I am asking this for is a rather small but busy one called it-friends. Half of my IT friends are Linux users, the other half use Windows. Every post is off-topic and that's really fine with all of us, that's exactly why the list is fun.

I cannot enforce policies on my friends by moderating manually: too much work. And I'd like to keep my friends so unsubscribing them for their lack of Netiquette cannot be done. They all know I have a policy to send decent replies and I inform them to use it often - which always results into nice discussions and mockery.

At the moment I am thinking of writing a simple filter that will bounce a mail when it sees regular lines before "> Original message".

Try Listar

[Mark F. Komarinski]

It'll be hard to take care of big lengthy replies and things like that, but I've been doing some tinkering with Listar. Documentation is really spotty, but it appears to do things like strip out most attachments, and convert HTML attachements to plain text. There's also apparently a quoting limit (I haven't tested this).

Re:User Education and Outlook Replies

[Ed Avis]

You _can_ set up Outlook to do things properly. If you have Outlook 98 or later you can tell it to post in plain text; I think the option is probably there in older versions too, though you have to dig for it.

Re:Trying to sow a field with a Honda Civic

[bluGill]

ick, slashcode is slow. I often wait several seconds for a reply to load in /. At least I don't have to load each reply seperatly like most web forums, but even still the speed is unaccaptable. (For what /. does I don't see how you can make things better, but I still don't like it)

Mailing lists allow me to read one message while the next downloads. procmail give fairly good filtering on my end if I need it. I agree that I don't like them, but they do work.

Usenet is best, IMHO, but you need to deal with spam. (Private news servers are okay, but not much better then mail software for small groups.

Re:What I've never understood

[Ed Avis]

No, the person reading the message to does _not_ necessarily know what you're replying to. If you have a one-to-one conversation by mail, quoting might not be needed, although if the person you're replying to is busy or gets a lot of mail then he might appreciate a bit of context to jog his memory.

But on a public list, most of the recipients cannot be expected to instantly recall what you're talking about. Especially not if there are two or three discussions going on at the same time. Help them out by writing your message so that any reader could instantly get the gist of things.

That doesn't mean making them scroll through pages and pages of quoted text. Just select a few lines which are relevant. Alternatively, you could include comments like '[style of quoting in messages] ' to make it clear what you're talking about. Or you could avoid quoting altogether and rephrase things in your own words (like this message).

If you're reading messages on a handheld, you can set up procmail to summarize them (eg show the first two non-comment lines). But also remember that a message like 'I agree' followed by pages and pages of quoted junk (as people tend to produce with Outlook) is also unreadable on a handheld.

You have all you need...

[Matts]

First of all, the other post here marked "The Human Approach" is a very important part of a burgeoning mailing list. But the other stuff is already available in the "better" version of ezmlm: ezmlm-idx. So get that instead.

The idx version not only allows you to create a web archive of the list that's dynamically updated, but it also allows you to strip HTML posts, remove "bad" attachments (above a certain size, certain attachment types, etc) and a bunch of wonderful moderation options.

Try it.

Re:What I've never understood

[AdamJ]

Because it's more natural to read that way. It may be several hours or several days since you last read a post on that subject, and on a busy list with topics that range wildly it's often hard to keep track of just every thread that's going on. Also, for someone reading the archives (Either of usenet posts or email), it's easier if there's some level of relevant quoting so they don't have to hunt through the other posts on the subject to find out what's being replied to.

Personally I favour placing replies below the quoted material for a few reasons:

* It means that people are more likely to snip irrelevant stuff it's above what they've written, while plenty of people who reply above just include the whole message below, including .sigs.
* It shows that the person has at least skimmed the message, as opposed to just hitting "reply" and typing wildly
* As mentioned above, when you haven't been paying attention to the entire thread I find it easier to read, especially if there's multiple replies in a single message, such as:

---
> Blah blah

oh really? very interesting..

> blah blah blah!

You just said that..

> blah blah!!

Okay, now you're just being repetitive.
---

However, if the person running the mailing list or the majority of the list members prefer placing replies on top, as long as everyone does it that way it's not a big deal, although I personally find it harder to read.

Consistency is the key, IMO.

Adam