On Wed, 7 Jul 1993 16:43:03 EDT Michael H. Morse said on List-Managers:
>Scott Ophof said:
>> Aside from the issue of fairness to the authors, there's the
>> practical question of confusion amongst users of these MLMs.
>> Anyone used to "Revised LISTSERV" for example can get rather upset
>> when addressing an MLM with <listserv@...> and getting unexpected
>> responses...
>Hmmm. I have over 2,000 users on a non-"Revised Listserv" called
>"listserv@nsf.gov", and nobody has ever complained. Could it be that
>this esoteric stuff is more interesting to developers than to users,
>who just might be smarter than we think? Could it be that users of
>"Revised LISTSERV" are fewer in number than the hordes of new
>users that are flooding the Internet?
I don't know how large those "hordes" are, and would be interested
in at least a fair guesstimate.
There is less guessing in the following extract from private mail
from Eric Thomas, where he suggests I point out to Michael a few
things. I chose to interpret that as meaning posting it was OK.
Start-of-quote:
|| [..] that he should refrain from talking about things he doesn't
|| know about, such as the reason why LISTSERV is called LISTSERV and
|| not something else, or the amount of users it has. LISTSERV's
|| membership exceeded 1,000,000 in June and it delivers 2-6 million
|| messages every day.
|| I waste several hours every month due to people who confuse 'unix
|| listserv' and LISTSERV. I even get bug reports for 'unix listserv'.
|| The confusion goes both ways, and some users ask why the command to
|| subscribe to LISTSERV lists is not 'add' like with their local unix
|| list server. The IETF thinks it is a very serious problem and wants
|| to standardize the syntax. You may quote as little or as much as
|| you want from this message.
End-of-quote.
I'd like to add that there are something like 2500-3000 lists
registered with "Revised LISTSERV".
As to those bug reports and confusion items Eric mentions, if I were
in his position I'd forward them straight to List-Managers, ListNix,
and other relevant lists/groups for resolving and CONTINUE to do so
till fair action was taken. But I'm not in his position, so all I
can do is what I'm doing now.
Aside from all else, user-confusion should be minimised, and anyone
with a heart for other network users would want to do so as soon as
possible, right?
Can anyone come up with figures on how many people are subscribed to
the non-"Revised LISTSERV" MLMs? Maybe we can then get some idea of
how many (and which) users would have to be re-educated IF various
MLM authors and people running MLMs were to consider making changes.
Regards, and thanks in advance.
$$\ F. Scott Ophof <Ophof@CS.UWindsor.ca>
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