Re: "Abuse" of Contact User feature

["Matthew East" <mdke@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 4:10 PM, Matthew East <mdke@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Personally, I think that if a team doesn't have a mailing list or
> contact address set up, then the user who wishes to contact that team
> should be permitted to contact the team administrators, but not the
> whole team. A team might easily choose not to have a contact address
> on purpose, because they don't want people to contact all team members
> in this way.

A further reflection on this. Recently I've been seeing quite a few
mails in my inbox which come through Launchpad. As far as I can guess
from the context (because Launchpad doesn't tell me where the mails
have come from) they have been sent to the ~communitycouncil,
~ubuntumembers, or ~ubuntu-doc teams. Receiving emails in this way is
quite inconvenient, because:

1. There is no way to tell to which team they have been sent, so you
frequently have to guess what the person is talking about.
2. There is no way to tell whether anyone has already responded to the
email before I do (unlike with proper mailing lists).
3. All the teams already have established and documented ways for
people to contact them, either by mailing list or otherwise, and the
introduction of this new Launchpad feature has forcibly changed
workflows without prior notice or choice on the part of the team.

Point 1 above is just a bug, and can be fixed, but points 2 and 3 seem
to me to point out clearly why this feature should not have been
introduced for teams, either at all, or at the very least before
further discussion and planning has been carried out. Otherwise, this
feature is just introducing an inferior type of mailing list for every
team.

Don't get me wrong, it's great to have a private possibility to
contact individual users who don't publish their email addresses, but
for teams this is a whole different kettle of fish.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF