Tagging csail-local posts
People posting to the https://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/csail-local mailing list are encouraged to tag their posts with appropriate hashtags, as an aid for filtering and to help list members decide which posts to read. More information about this is available in this post to the list (list membership required to follow that link).
When posting, you can use appropriate hashtag-style tags in your subject line to tag your posts. (It’s understood that not all posts may have an appropriate preexisting tag.) As of this writing (2021-03-05), the initial set of tags the mailing-list moderators are encouraging people to use is
- #heavy: Potentially upsetting, difficult conversations
- #timely: Time sensitive, e.g. upcoming talk, or need a response soon
- #jobs: Jobs
- #housing: Housing
- #humor: Humor
- #help: Help, including logistics, questions about software tools, plumbers, etc.
- #events: Events, including social events and talks
- #research: Research, discussions or questions related to research at CSAIL
- #not-csail: Off topic, events etc. not directly related to CSAIL
- #politics: Politics
- #news: News
but we expect the list may grow organically as people start using new tags and they become popular.
List members can use these tags to filter list posts in several ways:
- mentally filter by deciding based on hashtags which posts to read and which to skip,
- use the list software’s “Topics” facility to decide which topics to subscribe to and which not, or
- if you receive your mail on CSAIL’s IMAP server, use the Mail Filters functionality our IMAP server provides to sort or filter your list mail (or similar functionality provided wherever you do receive your mail, e.g. Gmail), or
- use sorting and filtering functionality built into your email client.
The “Topics” facility built into the GNU Mailman mailing-list software we use at CSAIL is a bit crude – it only allows a message to be assigned to a single “Topic”, for instance, even if it has multiple hashtags – but it’s built into the list software so it’s available and works the same way for everyone on the list.