If you want people to submit a patch or bug report via mailing list, but you make people subscribe before they can post, that is a major barrier.
In the olden days, mailing lists worked without stringent subscription requirements. Subscription is a tool for those who want to get all future traffic. Now it is used for spam control.
I've run into people who are vehemently in favor of Reply-To munging. The reasons are always idiotic and can be summarized as follows, "you must join this mailing list and read everything that goes on for a while before posting, or else fuck you! We don't need clueless postings from casual outsiders who can't be bothered to subscribe and drink all the Kool-Aid."
* It's 2018! For pete's sake, allow HTML. HTML mails allow a modicum of formatting. The occasional image is useful too. Most people have HTML capable mail readers. There is such a thing as being too conservative.
I allow HTML in all my mailing lists, and allow HTML to propagate into the mail archives. (After careful security scrubbing.)
I wrote this flex-scanner-driven HTML cleaner in C for the purpose: http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/hc/tree/
It uses a whitelist of HTML tags and for each whitelisted tag, a whitelist of attributes. All else is stripped away.
* allow non-subscribers to post.
* do not enable Reply-To: header generation which excludes non-subscribers from receiving replies. See https://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html
If you want people to submit a patch or bug report via mailing list, but you make people subscribe before they can post, that is a major barrier.
In the olden days, mailing lists worked without stringent subscription requirements. Subscription is a tool for those who want to get all future traffic. Now it is used for spam control.
I've run into people who are vehemently in favor of Reply-To munging. The reasons are always idiotic and can be summarized as follows, "you must join this mailing list and read everything that goes on for a while before posting, or else fuck you! We don't need clueless postings from casual outsiders who can't be bothered to subscribe and drink all the Kool-Aid."
* It's 2018! For pete's sake, allow HTML. HTML mails allow a modicum of formatting. The occasional image is useful too. Most people have HTML capable mail readers. There is such a thing as being too conservative.
I allow HTML in all my mailing lists, and allow HTML to propagate into the mail archives. (After careful security scrubbing.)
I wrote this flex-scanner-driven HTML cleaner in C for the purpose: http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/hc/tree/ It uses a whitelist of HTML tags and for each whitelisted tag, a whitelist of attributes. All else is stripped away.