[gentoo-user] Hard to find netiquette, enculturation bug. (Was: Re: [gentoo-user] GNOME: Cant logout and Lock Screen is showing different background from GNOME screensaver)

[Mark David Dumlao]

Hi gentoo-user,
The previous week I asked a little something about some gnome problems
and was surprised that while other mails were getting responses within
hours, even minutes, of posting, I had posted and reposted the same
message three times over the span of a week - to no joy. I figured
that the volume of the mailing list made it highly improbable for
there to be not even 1 answer to what seems to be a well-formed
question, so a problem was at hand.

Thinking it had to do with mailing list subscription issues (I've
changed emails in the past), I unsubscribed, resubscribed and
reposted, to no avail. On perhaps my third or fourth repost, I found a
shocking answer:

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 8:24 AM, Nicolas Sebrecht
<nicolas.s-dev@××××××××.net> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:06:26PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
>
> >    er, anyone?
>
> You may try by sending a mail using the text format instead of the HTML
> one. I don't read more than one line when it's written in HTML. I
> suspect that a lot of contributors do the same here.
>
> Please, conform to the netiquette.

That was one of the coldest, most invisible, and hardest to
troubleshoot communication errors I've ever seen. I don't even know
where to begin. It's like being in a foreign country and being told,
years later, that wearing shoes there meant "I'm not serious, so
please ignore my opinions.".  The funny thing is, I have been
subscribed to this mailing list for maybe 2 years now, mostly just for
asking questions, but I didn't suspect that I was being ignored since
I usually got one or two answers.

I would like to express must-needed-to-be-expressed frustration, as
there is place for it, and to make aware that that is a serious
problem.

I am currently searching my subscription info, the gentoo site, or the
mailing list welcome for any hints that html messages are rude or
unwanted. I am having some difficulty finding it, that alone is a
warning sign that the amount of pre-specialization needed to
participate in the community is dangerously prohibitive to the point
where it is almost invisible.

Here's the gentoo mailing lists list for reference:
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml

Here's what the mlmm welcome email looks like
=== snip
Welcome! You have been subscribed to the

gentoo-user@l.g.o

mailinglist.

To unsubscribe send a message to:

gentoo-user+unsubscribe@l.g.o

And for help send a message to:

gentoo-user+help@l.g.o
=== /snip

And of course the confirmation email
=== snip
i, this is the mlmmj program managing the mailinglist

gentoo-user@l.g.o

To confirm you want the address

foo@doman

added to this list, please send a reply to

gentoo-user+confsub-gibberishcode-foo=domain@l.g.o

This confirmation serves two purposes. It tests that mail can be sent to
your address. Secondly it makes sure someone else did not try and
subscribe your email address without your permission.

Your mailer may automatically reply to the confirmation address when you hit
the reply button.

The subject and the body of the mail can be anything.
=== /snip


This is a _community-wide_bug_, if ever there was a place to file it.
I don't recall it being rude to send html emails anywhere else without
it appearing in bold letters. Had I known, I would have always used
plain formatting.

If the memo appears somewhere, it might have to do with some transient
step of the subscription process. That does make it hard to find now
that I'm looking for it.

What's up with html e-mails, btw? Most public emails send html e-mail
by default, and one imagines that there would be a wide range of
capabilities from the readers in the portage tree...

(btw, I'm already having leads on my GNOME problem, something about
some packages coming from overlays and some packages coming from
portage, perhaps some kind of mismatch).