RE: Proposal: an "important-news" IETF announcement list

[Adrian Farrel <[e-mail]>]

I promised I wouldn't get sucked in, but reading Bob's latest I find myself typing anyway.

>> The IESG is therefore considering creating a new mailing list for
>> important organizational announcements only. We are hoping that a
>> subscription to a new low-volume mailing list will be acceptable to
>> IETF participants that find ietf-announce too noisy, and will help us
>> disseminate important news and announcements more widely and effectively.
>> 
>> Here are the details about this proposal:
>> 
>> * The name of the new mailing list is important-news.
>
> Suggest “ietf-important-news”, like “ietf-announce”.

Can we avoid mailing list title inflation?
Just "ietf-news" should do the job.

>>  - The ietf-announce mailing list will continue to operate as-is.
>> 
>>  - All emails sent to important-news will be CC’ed to ietf-announce.

Really? Why? This seems to totally deny the value of a new list. It is also not very pleasant in the context of the "mandatory subscription" described below because now people will get two copies of emails.

>> * Subscriptions
>> 
>>  - Every participant with a current Datatracker account will be
>>    automatically subscribed to important-news.

Please don't do that. It is inertia subscription. That is not nice in my opinion.

How about sending each Datatracker account registered email address an email offering them "click here to subscribe"?

>>  - Every participant creating a new Datatracker account will
>>    automatically be subscribed to important-news.

This can be handled with a check box during account creation so that the account holder has the option.

>>  - Any important-news subscriber can unsubscribe at any time.

Which is fine, but requires opt-out action which should not be the default.

Ciao,
Adrian