Originally posted by Malenfant:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
You should see the TML. It's been having a severe low-posting rate, lately. There was a time a while back, Sep 2004, when the total email text size for the month was less than one megabyte.
The TML itself puts me off posting (for a start, I don't like the mailing list format) - but I read the archives occasionally and most of the posts there are totally off-topic and have nothing to do with Traveller. I'm not exactly going to join or contribute to a mailing list where most posts are irrelevant to the subject that is supposed to be discussed. </font>[/QUOTE]There is something to what you say, but I feel that the signal/noise ratio isn't quite
that bad.
<micro-rant style="frustration-level:substantial">
My main problem with the TML is that many people there use email clients that do odd things to the contents of the subject line of the email. Typically, it's standard for an email client to put "RE:" at the front of the subject line when replying. The list itself adds "[TML]" to the beginning of the subject, so the first email for a subject someone posts starts with that (when it gets back to me). Then, continuing posts are "RE: [TML]" or "RE:[TML]. Both of which are recognized as the same subject. Now, some people's email clients manage to add spaces in random locations in the subject line (sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end, whatever), and this causes standard email clients to think, erroneously, that the one-space-different email is a
different subject. Why does that matter? Because I've set my email client to "group" by subject, so all emails on one subject, are, theoretically, all together, and the slightly differing subject lines cause "differing groups" to splinter off. Some email clients manage, somehow, to stick "RE:" on the right side of [TML], for "[TML] RE:", which my email client also regards as a new and different subject line. All in all, differing braches of the disucussion wind up appearing in widely separated locations (I don't read them all, and don't delete them fast enough to prevent there from being a fairly lengthy list which I hunt and peck through, and differing branches of the same subject wind up all over the place).
It makes it very difficult to follow some discussions. At one point, it was so bad, that some discussions were fragmenting into seven to ten branches.
Here on CotI, that's doesn't happen nearly as often. When a branch occurs, most simply place a URL link, and people can follow it to the new branch if desired.
</mirco-rant>
wherever it should belong 
