Re: [Mickaboo Techlist] Cross-post protections on admins and discuss

My opinion is still that we should have a third list. So that, discuss is non-task chat about birds. People asking questions, getting help, news, that sort of thing. Admins is anything that only the people with access to it should see. The problem is that discuss is so chatty that people who are serious about helping with tasks, but that aren't on admins, are sort of stuck with discuss and can become disillusioned when it covers so many other topics that aren't directly related to getting a task done. They just don't have time for that. That's probably why so many are on digest. And, I think we actually lose some people who'd otherwise volunteer. A friend of mine just adopted a bird from us and was interested in perhaps volunteering, so she joined discuss and at first read it, but it got so overwhelming and off-topic that she stopped reading it altogether. I think the reason admins and discuss get CC'd is because we lack a third option, that I would call Volunteers. And, only people signed up to be Mickaboo volunteers would be on it. They would not need to have done much yet or taken a phone screen class, but they would have expressed an interest in helping. And that list would include: requests for: - phone screens - home visits - transportation - fostering - help with events - help with <a Mickaboo task> - faxes received for <...> - classes The discuss list would be all the other chat that is not directly related to a Mickaboo task, like "who wants some manzanita?" or "can I feed my bird shrimp?" or "what kind of cage should I get for ...?" or "how do I introduce two birds...?" Wayne Coburn wrote:

Hello,

Well, I don't have anything against approving things by hand, but anything we can do to automate the process is very welcome. :-) Since almost everyone on the admins list is also on discuss, and since virtually everything cc'ed to both lists is intended for discuss, my preference is to hold anything send to admins that is cc'ed to discuss. This is essentially what happens now when a non-admin posts to admins, but in general I approve these posts because I try to moderate for content as little as possible. I am happy to discard and reject more, especially if that's the policy and we educate people about it.

Wayne Coburn http://coburn-family.net

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 11:13 AM, AMuse mailto:amuse@foofus.com> wrote:

FYI tech folks and Michelle:

After some conversations with various folks about cross-posting on the discuss and admins lists (and a few emails from very confused members of discuss) I have decided to implement cross-post protection on the two mailing lists.

A casual analysis of the email traffic on those lists for various days indicates that, on a average day, between 50% and 90% of the emails sent to discuss@mickaboo are also CCed to admins@mickaboo. Many emails sent to admins@mickaboo asking for help are also CCed to discuss@mickaboo.

As a result almost everything we discuss, we discuss on TWO mailing lists, with all but three members of admins@mickaboo being on discuss@mickaboo also. ust look at the thread from today "Brand new exercise...." to see almost all posts in duplicate and even triplicate. This is detracting from the purpose of admins@mickaboo (the business management of mickaboo) and confusing people on discuss who don't know what the admins list is and why their replies to discuss get a bound (from admins which they're not on).

For now, any emails sent to one list and CCed to the other will both be held for moderation, and the mods (Wayne, Mal, Me, etc) will have to pick which list to allow the post through on and which list to discard it. I'll be simultaneously doing outreach to the mailing list folks and letting them know to NOT cross-post. After a long while we'll just set cross-posted messages to automatically discard.

I'm open to reviewing this decision; it's not firm, so please do discuss if you'd like.