Dragaera

Digest option + RASFW

Mon Jun 10 11:04:15 PDT 2002

David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net> wrote on 10 Jun 2002 00:37:15
> 
> "Joe Lynch" <joelynch at inreach.com> writes:
> 
> > p.s. And as for list volume- try the digest option if you haven't
> > noticed it before...I quickly switched after getting 50 emails in
> > one day. :)

The volume surprised me, too.  I know that different mailing lists
have different characteristics, but I wasn't expecting this one to be
so active without a new book having come out.

> I really need to make that more prominent on the web page for the
> list.  I'll keep it in mind for when I'm creating the new lists, which
> seems like it's going to happen.

Note that it is currently set to send a digest if 30 e-mails
accumulates, so it is possible to get multiple digests in one day,
which has already happened since I switched to the digest.

Note also that some mail programs might not have good support for
digests, most notably a way of 'undigestify'ing a digest into
individual email messages so that:

    + You can filter messages in a digest just like any other e-mail,
      e.g. to direct Steve's replies to a special inbox.
    + You can skip messages you're not interested in.
    + You can easily skip the rest of a message that contains spoilers.
      (If you read the entire digest as a text file and are manually
      trying to scroll past spoiled text, you have squint or block
      part of the screen to avoid reading the spoilers.)
    + You can reply to an individual message, with appropriate attribution
      (name of the sender) and quoting.

Beldarrin at aol.com wrote on Mon, 10 Jun 2002 12:10:18
> 
>      Heh, since I seem to be not welcome here anyway (or at least
>that's the vibe I seem to unerringly be getting), I'll raise my hand
>and volunteer to be the jerk.

I haven't got any vibes that anyone here is not welcome.
 
>      Speaking for myself, I expected maybe 10, 20 at most, e-mails
>per day when I signed up for the mailing list, and I've been shocked
>at the number of e-mails swamping my poor little mailbox ever since.
>(Wouldn't some sort of a message board be more appropriate under the
>circumstances?  That way at least we can sift through the topics and
>choose which ones we feel like subjecting ourselves to at any given
>moment.)  
-snip-

You can always try to skip some messages, and a good mail program
should let you do filtering, but I have to admit that I don't do any
filtering on my e-mail.

But it is sentiments like the above that make me fond of newsgroups,
including rec.arts.sf.written (RASFW), which does discuss Brust from
time to time.  As its name suggests, rasfw has a broader focus than
this mailing list, which has its pluses and minuses.  A good
newsreader lets you easily:

    + auto-delete or auto-select articles with a given Subject
    + auto-delete or auto-select articles from a given author
    + delete (for today or forever) an article and all replies to it
    etc.

And one thing I'm still need to learn, is that if there are many posts
I'm not interested in, it is ok to be over-aggressive in
(auto-)deleting subjects and authors and miss *some* interesting posts
as long as a high enough fraction of the remaining posts keep me
interested and happy.

(
It's going to be interesting for me to when a new book comes out and
I'll have to choose whether to post here or rasfw or both.  I suspect
I'll tend to choose rasfw because I'm more proficient at using my
newsreader than I am at using my mailer.
)
 
- tky