RE: Making the list more useable

["Thomas Michanek" <thomas.michanek@xxxxxx>]

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> From: Ken Banks
> Copyediting-L is the best-run list I've seen. Another
> high-volume list, it uses a system of tags that allow for filtering of
> posts, and the digests come in manageable sizes of about 15 or 20 posts.
> We busy Framers would benefit if our list were made over along similar
lines.
> What does everyone think?

Even though this mainly concern the high-volume FrameUsers list, I'll
throw in my comments to the Free Framers list:

Using "tags", perhaps like adding "[Framers]" to each list message's
Subject, has the following drawbacks:
* It will make Subject lines longer. Many email clients have a limited
  amount of space for the Subject and will truncate long lines. You will
  have to read further to the right to find the interesting part of the
  Subject line (the actual topic), which will risk becoming truncated.
* Experience shows that "tags" in many cases soon will create Subject lines
  of the type "Re: [Framers] Re: [Framers] Re: Actual topic", which will
  further emphasize the above problem and lead to difficulties for email
  clients to "thread" messages correctly into conversations.

Most modern email clients have filtering options based on sender or receiver,
which means that you don't need "tags" to sort out interesting messages or
group messages according to mailing lists. Use these filtering options!

If you use a filtering scheme so that all Framers messages are put in a
separate email folder or group in your client software, you may not even
have to use the digest version at all. It is, after all, much easier to
find, sort out, read and reply to messages if they are received as
individual messages with separate Subject lines. Digests are long, full
of quoted messages, and have bad Subject lines. Have you seen messages
posted with Subjects of "RE: Framers digest ..."? Not very user-friendly.

You may have software that can break apart a digest message into separate
messages to overcome the above problem, but then you might consider to
receive individual messages from the start instead.

That's my 0.02 Euro or Krona :-)

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Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
mailto:Thomas.Michanek@iar.se     (Sweden)
http://w1.133.telia.com/~u13304072/framers
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