Hi, all -- Thanks to Charles for providing the extra context, which is very helpful. Since he says the Exec is looking for input from the list as a whole, here's my small contribution. Seems to me that either setup is inconvenient for someone: the new system places a burden (however small) on people who want to keep an ongoing conversation onlist, the old system places a burden (however small) on people who want to reply offlist to messages that appeared onlist. Neither of these burdens is exactly outrageous -- we're not talking about poll taxes or mandatory 30-day waiting periods here -- but they're still likely to produce very different types of list activity. The new system makes people who want to keep an open dialogue going do a small amount of extra work, while it protects people who aren't actually trying to contribute to a public conversation from doing so accidentally. The old system makes people who wanted to continue onlist conversations privately do a small amount of extra work, while it allows people who want to have a public conversation to do so easily. At the risk of echoing Marj's comments, the new system seems like an ideal choice if we assume that AIR-L is primarily an announcement-centered list for CFPs, job postings, and such. The tiny bit of extra friction involved in keeping a conversation going onlist keeps the air(-l) relatively clear so that the those announcements can happen. If, however, we assume that AIR-L is supposed to be a "place" where internet researchers can converse with one another in an open forum, then the old system is better -- especially since the list hasn't exactly been flooded with embarrassing and/or career-killing personal messages -- since it offloads that tiny bit of extra friction onto people who aren't actually trying to keep that public conversation going anyway. Personally, I favor the old system. As long as we're hoping that AIR-L is for open dialogue as much as (if not more than) it is for announcements, it seems to me that the bias -- however small it might be, either way -- should run in favor of the people who're doing the most work to keep that conversation going. Put a slightly different way, the "accidents" in the new system hurt that open dialogue, since those accidents involve would-be posters forgetting to use "reply-all" and thus sliding into private conversations. And that seems like a much steeper price to pay than the occasional personal message slipping through every few months. cheers gil PS: One additional bit of context for my remarks above. Since 1996, I've managed a public listserv that currently has 2250 members and averages roughly 100 posts every month. It's always been set up so that replies go to the whole list. We get a handful of accidental personal messages every year ... and I suspect I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of those that were scandalous enough to raise anyone's eyebrows. When we've had serious scandal/trouble -- and it's been a while (he said, tempting fate recklessly) -- it's almost always come from people who knew quite well that they were posting to the whole list. Obviously, different lists have different purposes, involve different communities, and produce different cultures of their own. But, in my experience anyway, the biggest threat to lively onlist dialogue comes from spam and flames, not from the occasional "I am very interested in your job/conference/book-project" message that accidentally slips through.