Hi gentoo-user, The previous week I asked a little something about some gnome problems and was surprised that while other mails were getting responses within hours, even minutes, of posting, I had posted and reposted the same message three times over the span of a week - to no joy. I figured that the volume of the mailing list made it highly improbable for there to be not even 1 answer to what seems to be a well-formed question, so a problem was at hand.
Thinking it had to do with mailing list subscription issues (I've changed emails in the past), I unsubscribed, resubscribed and reposted, to no avail. On perhaps my third or fourth repost, I found a shocking answer: On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 8:24 AM, Nicolas Sebrecht <nicolas.s-...@lapostes.net> wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:06:26PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote: > > > er, anyone? > > You may try by sending a mail using the text format instead of the HTML > one. I don't read more than one line when it's written in HTML. I > suspect that a lot of contributors do the same here. > > Please, conform to the netiquette. That was one of the coldest, most invisible, and hardest to troubleshoot communication errors I've ever seen. I don't even know where to begin. It's like being in a foreign country and being told, years later, that wearing shoes there meant "I'm not serious, so please ignore my opinions.". The funny thing is, I have been subscribed to this mailing list for maybe 2 years now, mostly just for asking questions, but I didn't suspect that I was being ignored since I usually got one or two answers. I would like to express must-needed-to-be-expressed frustration, as there is place for it, and to make aware that that is a serious problem. I am currently searching my subscription info, the gentoo site, or the mailing list welcome for any hints that html messages are rude or unwanted. I am having some difficulty finding it, that alone is a warning sign that the amount of pre-specialization needed to participate in the community is dangerously prohibitive to the point where it is almost invisible. Here's the gentoo mailing lists list for reference: http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml Here's what the mlmm welcome email looks like === snip Welcome! You have been subscribed to the gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailinglist. To unsubscribe send a message to: gentoo-user+unsubscr...@lists.gentoo.org And for help send a message to: gentoo-user+h...@lists.gentoo.org === /snip And of course the confirmation email === snip i, this is the mlmmj program managing the mailinglist gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org To confirm you want the address f...@doman added to this list, please send a reply to gentoo-user+confsub-gibberishcode-foo=dom...@lists.gentoo.org This confirmation serves two purposes. It tests that mail can be sent to your address. Secondly it makes sure someone else did not try and subscribe your email address without your permission. Your mailer may automatically reply to the confirmation address when you hit the reply button. The subject and the body of the mail can be anything. === /snip This is a _community-wide_bug_, if ever there was a place to file it. I don't recall it being rude to send html emails anywhere else without it appearing in bold letters. Had I known, I would have always used plain formatting. If the memo appears somewhere, it might have to do with some transient step of the subscription process. That does make it hard to find now that I'm looking for it. What's up with html e-mails, btw? Most public emails send html e-mail by default, and one imagines that there would be a wide range of capabilities from the readers in the portage tree... (btw, I'm already having leads on my GNOME problem, something about some packages coming from overlays and some packages coming from portage, perhaps some kind of mismatch).
