recently we had some discussion on pd-ot, which most of you probably have missed:

the basic idea was to automatically send [pd-announce] mails to the pd-list.

historical background

up till now, there were 2 ways of using pd-announce:

groupA assumes that people subscribed to pd-list are also subscribed to pd-announce, so they only send announcements to pd-announce. unfortunately this is not the truth (there are about 1350 people subscribed to pd-list (including double and disabled subscriptions) and only approx 650 subscribers to pd-announce)

groupB does not assume that all pd-list-subscribees are also subscribed at pd-announce, and therefore post announcements to both lists, resulting in cross-posts for those who _are_ subscribed on both lists. currently 2/3 of the email-addresses subscribed to pd-announce are also subscribed to pd-list. (this does not include people who are subscribed to both lists with different email-addresses)

my original intention for separating the lists was to make "important announcements" available to people who are not really interested in following all the discussion at pd-list. this means, that pd-announce should be a subset of pd-list (all mails going to pd-announce are also meant for pd-list).

the reason why it became 2 different lists was merely technical.

so what?

both groupA and groupB "annoy" a rather large number of people (>100), either because recipients get announcement-mails 2 times or not at all.

the solution could be simple: subscribe the entire pd-list to pd-announce (so all announcements go to pd-list and thus to all pd-list subscribees) AND disable the direct delivery of pd-announce for all those addresses that are also subscribed to pd-list.

does this sound good?

drawbacks

• people subscribed to the pd-list who do NOT want to receive

pd-announce mails would have to take care of that themselves. (but even this task would be simplified in relation to the cross-posting solution).

• it is still a solution driven by technical feasibility rather than

what we really want to acchieve. (imho, an ideal solution would make pd-lists (un)subscription a matter of (de)activating a check-box in the user-preferences of the puredata.info portal)

feedback is welcome

mfg.adsr. IOhannes