[clue] Mailing list technical questions

[David L. Anselmi]

Brad Morgan wrote:
>> The announcement and job lists will be restored. There are no plans to

That's interesting.  I wish you'd attributed the quote because I haven't seen that post yet.

> Can someone please explain to me the differences between one list with tags
> and multiple lists without tags?

There seem to be two possibilities:

a) tags are fairly arbitrary and flexible and made up by whoever is posting

Filtering on that turns out to be an exercise in AI, and not very interesting.  I can filter much 
better on a full subject line than a short tag.  My computer can't filter on either if they are 
arbitrary.

b) we make a list of official tags for the kinds of topics we want to segment

This seems the same as multiple lists.  Except that with multiple lists the sender filters rather 
than the receiver.  I'm happy to filter by selecting a to: address.  I'm not happy to do it with 
tags, because my software doesn't make it easy.

Gus pointed out that there are other cultures that use tags successfully (though in a forum rather 
than a mailing list).  This culture has not done that.  It will be interesting to see whether tags 
catch on.  Probably some "save the planet" style propaganda would help.

Dave