Dear Europa Forum members,
I have chosen to stay quiet up to now on the subject of the infamous
Reply to issue. However, I feel that I must state my opinion as I am
quite unhappy about the way the Europa forum bulletin board has
deteriorated. I have had some correspondence on this subject off the
forum but that does not seem to have achieved anything so I am now going
public.
I think the time has come to make the change back to the old system. On
the old server, when a reply was made, the sender chose whether to reply
to the individual or to the forum or both. What I have seen with the new
system is that many people have been caught out when they carefully
chose to reply to the individual and then found that it had been
inadvertently posted to all. On occasion, there have been personal
comments or items which I am sure they would rather not have shared and
this continues to happen. It is now a rather long winded procedure to do
a personal reply smoothly. Some users may not be adept and may find it
difficult. I am also sure that on occasion some people prefer to reply
direct to avoid the sometimes critical observations or "flamers" which
crop up from time to time on the forum.( Not many lately, I have to
say.)
Another side effect is that the forum now has has much more trivial
content. I was away from my PC for a week and when I returned, there
were over 100 messages. When I sifted through the material I found that
many messages were inconsequential and many of these, I believe, were
intended only for the original sender. Is it necessary for everybody to
know what dinner reservations are being made ?
I know that the forum users and the builders are adults and can be
trusted to send material to the forum when they wish to do so. This
procedure worked very well on the old server for many years. I also
believe it is wise to avoid software features which have a default mode
of doing what the designer thinks is best rather than leaving it up to
the user. This irritating style crops up in many software products.
The bottom line is that I request the forum minder, John Cliff, to
change the forum back to the old procedure of reply to sender by default
and copy to the forum by specific action.
With very best regards,
Cheers, John
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