On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 17:11:22 -0800 Chuq Von Rospach
<chuqui@plaidworks.com> said:
>Are you sure you aren't letting your personal attitude towards digests
>color how you think your users view them?
But I have not commented on whether or not my users like digests! Since I
always offer digests, and since I was speaking about lists I run in my
spare time, I just don't think it's relevant; they can have it their way
whether I use them myself or not on this or that particular list, and if
they don't like the defaults I chose they can go start their own list.
What I said is that users who are getting digests give me more trouble as
a whole, even though they're a minority, because answering questions from
human beings about why they didn't get this or that digest takes me a lot
more time than auto-processing bounces. Digests are also dangerous with
newbies. It doesn't matter how many times you tell them not to quote the
whole digest when replying, they'll do it anyway. You'll add code to
detect this and reject the posting, but it doesn't matter because they'll
find a new MUA that mangles the quoted message in such a way (for
instance a uuencoded "attachment" or maybe rewriting the header in X.400
or proprietary format) that they'll manage to quote it anyway. And even
if you succeed (or add a posting size limit so they *really* can't quote
the whole thing back), they'll write to ask how come they can't post to
the list, and you'll have to explain that the reply function isn't the
only way to post to a list, after which they'll ask you which menu you
are talking about and helpfully indicate that they are using a Gateway in
case it makes any difference. In a professional environment this may all
be fine and well, but when I run a list in my spare time I don't want to
do user support. I do enough of this at work, thank you very much :-) So
they get the regular subscription option that doesn't confuse them and I
have my bounces auto-processed and keep being a happy camper. I'm not
saying this is Better, I'm saying it saves me time. Maybe if I were
running my lists on 1991 hardware or if I had to read every single bounce
myself at 2400bps I would set things up differently, but that's another
story. Obviously this also depends on who your audience is and what mail
software they use.
Eric
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