On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > Another idea is to steal Ping's very cool idea of a 'nosy list'.
>
> I missed it. Sounds an interesting long-term solution. I've heard
> about a similar concept elsewhere: you never unsubscribe to a list,
> each subject has its own list, and subjects just die.
Yup, that's the general approach. The short paper is at
http://www.lfw.org/ping/roundup.html; here is an excerpt
describing the mechanism:
a. New issues are always submitted by sending an e-mail message.
This message is saved in a mail spool attached to the
newly-created issue record, and copied to the relatively large
user community of the application so everyone knows the issue
has been raised.
b. All e-mail messages sent by Roundup have their "Reply-To" field
set to send mail back to Roundup, and have the issue's ID number
in the Subject field. So, any replies to the initial announcement
and subsequent threads are all received by Roundup and appended
to the spool.
c. Each issue has a "nosy list" of people interested in the issue.
Any mail tagged with the issue's ID number is copied to this list
of people, and any users found in the From:, To:, or Cc: fields
of e-mail about the issue are automatically added to the nosy
list. Whenever a user edits an item in the Web interface, they
are also added to the list.
The result is that no one ever has to worry about subscribing to
anything. Indicating interest in an issue is sufficient, and if you
want to bring someone new into the conversation, all you need to do
is Cc: a message to them. It turns out that no one ever has to worry
about unsubscribing, either: the nosy lists are so specific in scope
that the conversation tends to die down by itself when the issue is
resolved or people no longer find it sufficiently important. The
transparent capture of the mail spool attached to each issue also
yields a nice searchable knowledge repository over time.
In practice, this has worked fairly well for developers at ILM, and
no one has complained about missing mail they wanted or getting mail
they didn't want -- which, given the apathetic nature of programmers,
i suppose one could interpret as a positive empirical result.
-- ?!ng
"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes."
-- Dr. Who
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