Having had to deal with (involuntary) user support for about 10 years, I
can safely say that there are only two ways to make users not use a
service that they find useful but are not supposed to use. One is to
prevent them from accessing the service altogether, which in this case is
not possible. The other is to make the service unuseful to them, in other
words, stop answering Majordomo questions on this list. Educating the
users is always a good idea, but they are so numerous that even if 10%
ignore the warnings, it will be 10 times above the pain threshold. And
then you have the "why not me?" syndrome, the 75% or so of users who
reluctantly heed the warning see Joe Bloke use the list anyway and get
the answer he wants, and after 3-4 occurrences they figure that if it's
ok for Joe, there's no reason for them not to do the same thing. Now if
instead of answering the questions, you always reply that this is the
wrong list and people should use list XYZ instead, users will get used to
the fact that you don't get answers from this list, and quit polluting.
Eric
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