New FAQ entry - NO DISCLAIMERS PLEASE

[Erik Harrison]

On 10/13/05, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 10/13/2005 1:31 PM, Auke Kok wrote:
> > I'm going to add another entry to the Xfce ML FAQ withg roughly the
> > following contents:
> >
> > ===
> >
> > Please, under all circumstances try to avoid posting messages with
> > corporate disclaimers or warnings. These messages are useless, mean
> > nothing legally, are annoying and sometimes outrageous, waste our time
> > trying to find the real content in your message, waste our bandwidth,
> > lower the quality of the mailinglist, and are just plain *annoing*.
> >
> > If your corporation requires you to use disclaimers in any way, please
> > sign up for a free webmail acount such as gmail, hotmail or others!
> >
> > ===
> >
> > I reserve the right to refuse messages to our mailinglists which contain
> > these disclaimers. Thanks for your consideration.
>
> I'm against this, for the following reasons:
>
> 1.  They actually do have legal meaning in some jurisdictions, though
> it's somewhat useless when posted to a mailing list with several hundred
> recipients and a public archive.
>
> 2.  Some company mail servers (like the one where I work) automatically
> append the disclaimer to outgoing email, so there's nothing people can
> do.  Though I'd argue that people shouldn't be posting here from their
> work email, unless their question is related to their job, but whatever.
>
> 3.  Refusing messages is a bit harsh, and while yes, you are the server
> admin, this isn't your mailing list.  If you want to implement this
> policy for the Lunar lists, that's certainly your prerogative.  I don't
> see why we need to be such jackasses about it.  (Yes, that was me saying
> we don't need to be jackasses.  Mark your calendars; it probably won't
> happen again.)
>
> 4.  Bandwidth is cheap.  (Yes, really, it is.)  If we can't handle a net
> increase of a few hundred kB per month (or even, to be conservatively
> outrageous, a few tens of MBs) due to a few disclaimers on emails from
> the mailing lists, we're in trouble.  The bandwidth is donated, anyway,
> so it's not like you can point to someone specifically (not even Remco)
> and say they're being financially hurt by silly disclaimers at the
> bottom of emails.
>
> 5.  As long as the disclaimers are at the bottom, and preceeded by a
> signature, or at least the sender signing their name, I have no problem
> finding content in the message.
>
> 6.  Sometimes they make me laugh.
>
> 7.  I'm sure there's a #7, and possibly a #8 and #9, but I'm lazy.

7. Technically, every message on the mailing list should have a
disclaimer - it should say "Yes, Brian is aware he's a jackass"

>
>         -brian
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
>
> iD8DBQFDTsee6XyW6VEeAnsRArPUAJ9WCwl9hnvD9pH/0HKJQYqRGqKebQCgqELy
> z4o6ykyT8fMqJOAdzS8Oybc=
> =HcVy
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Xfce mailing list
> Xfce at xfce.org
> http://foo-projects.org/mailman/listinfo/xfce
> http://www.xfce.org
>


--
Erik

"If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it
would have changed the history of music... and of aviation."