[External] Re: Perhaps it's time to think about enhancements to the NANOG list...?

Mon Mar 22 16:35:05 UTC 2021

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 9:16 AM Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> Without a word of exaggeration, it operates as if the developers had
> never seen a working mailing list. Quoting, signatures, sender
> addresses, reply-to addresses, HTTP vs text, archiving, threading,
> configuration - you name it, they screwed it up. Not in minor ways
> either.

Let me begin by stating that I prefer to participate via mail, and I
understand all of these things just fine.

However, I must point out that none of these things have the slightest
bit to do with network engineering, aside from the fact that people on
NANOG-L seem to expect you to understand them. It seems to me that the
goal of the board is to allow participation by people who are skilled
network engineers but do not care about HTML mail, top posting, or any
of this other stuff that only seems to ever come up on this list. And
I agree with that idea.

And as a final aside (not directed at you, Karl), lots of people on
this list seem to try to dunk on email clients that don't support
killfiles. In fact, I don't think such a thing exists. Even Gmail, one
of the most widely used email services, supports this. They just call
it "mute" and you do it by pressing 'm' on your keyboard. However,
lots of email clients exist that can't properly read HTML mail or
top-posted replies. Maybe people should stop using these incapable
clients and switch to something at least as capable as Gmail. Then
there would be no need for anyone on NANOG-L to understand these
idiosyncrasies.

--
Hunter Fuller (they)
Router Jockey
VBH Annex B-5
+1 256 824 5331

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