On 05:37 AM 11/27/97 +0000, the following was written by jonathon...
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> I discovered yesterday that I was the first person to be
> able to successfully unzubscribe from a mailing list, without
> having to get the list-owner's help. << It appears that
> people don't know how to send a confirmation message. >>
> Is this degree of cluelessness something that _might_ be
> specific to the lists I run, or is it a general phenomena?
> <-<-<-<-<-<-End of Quoted Material
<rant>
Actually, and I will stick to this til my dying day..., it's a case of
people not reading what they get. I mean, geez, how much more plain can
you get than what comes in the confirmation message?
Well, admittedly, they could be written a little better. The confirmation
message tends to be a little over-verbose. Simply put, they are asking "Do
you REALLY want to subscribe to this mailing list? If so hit the reply
button and send this back to me. Otherwise trash me." So why do we have
to rewrite War and Peace to say that?
But even those lists that do not require confirmations get their share of
cluelessness. Seems a lot of people just make up their own rules for how
this sh*t works.
I had one reader last week make attempt after attempt after attempt to get
off one of my lists and then had the audacity to cuss me out in a message
to the owner address that my list server wasn't working. I looked at his
attempts that he had forwarded to me (and I also compared them to the
bounced messaged I had from him all week long) and in every case )all seven
of them) the luser left the first 'B' out of the word 'unsubscribe'.
At the bottom of every list message I have a hyperlink that sets up the
unsub command perfectly in well behaved mail clients. However, people have
done so many things with that link that I can't believe it. One user cut
and past the entire link from the < to the > into the subject of the
message and sent it to the list address.
And the problem isn't unique to the clueless users either. Even the
supposedly informed members of the internet's sysadmin circle don't
understand this stuff either. After sending my generic "you've sent the
command to the wrong address, the correct address is..." message to the
same user in Holland over ten times one week, I get a message from his
ISP's sysadmin telling me my autoresponder is broke. I made up for it by
banning their domain.
Am I the only one around here that gets sadistic pleasure from
unsubscribing list members for bounces and random acts of stupidity like
that? :-)
Sometimes I feel like people who don't have enough intelligence to figure
out how to get off a list deserve every piece of mail they get. Other
times I wish they never got on.
Clueless? P:ossibly.
How do we deal with it? I've been trying to find that out myself. At
first I was very hard nosed about it. I wouldn't manually take a member of
a list until he proved to me beyond a doubt that MD was screwed so badly
that he couldn't get off the list. I wouldn't honore manual add/remove
requests at all. I was out to "educate the subscriber" Nowdays, I
boot''em before their send key cools down.
If anyone comes up with the solution, please CC it to my address???? Thanks.
</rant>
Paul
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(o)(o) Paul Allen Rice <mailto:PaulRice@Broadcast.net>
> Listowner: CircleJoke and Underground Mailing Lists
\/ Homepage: <http://www.sky.net/~price/poetry.htm>
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