Message arrival order?

[Paul Williams]

John Foust wrote:
> I've been receiving messages out of order: I'm seeing
> the responses well in advance of the original messages.
> Why would the list software do that?

There are two (related) reasons that I know of, neither of which should 
affect more than a small percentage of posts:

1. Alice sends a message to the list. Bob sends a reply, which goes to 
the list *and* Alice, for reasons we've discussed before. However, Bob 
doesn't post his reply from the address he subscribed to the list with, 
so it gets held for moderation. Before moderation happens, Alice replies 
to Bob's message (having received a copy directly), and this goes 
straight to the list. For a recent example of this, see the Econet 
thread, where Jules plays Alice and Dan guest stars as Bob.

2. Some people never post from the address they subscribed with! Their 
postings get held for moderation on cctalk and cctech. cctech is 
moderated more regularly than cctalk, because I expect cctalk's "held 
list" to mostly contain spam, which only needs clearing irregularly. Any 
cctech subscriber who replies to a posting will have their post 
distributed to both list views, possibly before the original post has 
come through on cctalk.

Still with me? OK, the root problem here is people posting from 
addresses different from those they subscribed with. The number of 
people doing this has increased over the past year. Perhaps they are 
unaware that they are doing it, so when I see subscribers' postings 
being held on cctalk, I'll send out a reminder, in case they would like 
to subscribe from their new address instead.

-- 
Paul