Mailing lists. Feh!

[redbird]

Two vaguely-related grumbles, here.

One is that I do not want to be on random friends' and acquaintances' lists for forwarding news about the attacks, anti-anything petitions, or the like. And I haven't come up with a concise, polite way of saying "stop that" to people who never asked if I wanted to be on it, and probably don't think of themselves as running mailing lists.

That's not an objection to bcc'd personal news or party invitations: if I've known you for years, sure, send along that COA or tell me you're having a barbecue. But if you want to run a Web log, set one up. Don't drop all the pieces in my email in-box.

Two, I've sort of inherited the job of organizing and announcing a local get-together for people who post to rec.arts.sf.[fandom|composition|written]. As an adjunct to that--also inherited--I send out a monthly copy of the announcement, because those are high-traffic newsgroups. But I'm getting more and more notes of the form "please add my friend so-and-so to the list" and/or "please add me/my friend to the list because I/they can't read the newsgroup." If someone can't be bothered to email me themselves, I don't see why I should take the trouble to put them on the list. My address isn't hard to find. And if you can't get at the newsgroups this event is organized around--not a difficult task these days--this isn't really your social event.

Someone I barely know, who a friend asked me to add a month or two ago, because she'd been out of fannish social circles for years, just asked me to add another friend. I told her more or less the above, starting with "tell him to write to me himself." I ended by saying that if she wanted to create a general social event for all of local fandom, that would be fine, and I'd forward the first announcement to my mailing list. But that's not what I'm organizing. I'm thinking of including an explicit note in the emailed version of the announcements, that the email list is an adjunct, and I'm not going to add people to it if they can't, or don't care to, look at Usenet.

Comments

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

I will say "Add the note!" So will Soren. You are doing this as a favor to people in the communities of Usenet that you frequent, not all of fandom/all local fans.

And I'm beginning to seriously consider telling certain people not to send me petitions and such, myself. And if they get offended or refuse to stop, there's always the email equivalent of a killfile (writes the woman who's gotten another damned anti-war petition in her email tonight, and thinks of them all as spam).

[redbird]

It's partly a matter of phrasing. At the moment, I'm leaning toward a policy of adding people only if they ask either in person at the meetings, or on r.a.sf.*.