At 7:26 PM 4/8/96, Eric Thomas wrote:
>For what little it might be worth, as a matter of policy I refuse to
>allow such services to subscribe to my lists when the stated default
>action is that they will subscribe automatically unless they hear
>otherwise from me. The rationale is that they're asking me a favour, from
>which they will collect $$$ (and I don't care if it's for profit or non
>profit, the fact of the matter is that this $$$ will be used to pay the
>requestor's paycheck). The least they could do (and I don't know the
>specifics of this particular service, since I haven't been contacted yet)
>is not to force me to individually reply to 150 solicitations for each of
>the ~150 lists I am in charge of, and put REJECT as the first line of my
>message (or whatever the case might be) if I do not want my lists
>included. As a matter of policy, I interpret this as an attempt to bully
>me into acceptance to maximize the $$$ transfer, and I filter out the
>requestor's domain so that they cannot subscribe to any of the lists. To
>put it simply, when people ask me a favour I expect them to minimize the
>amount of work that it will take me to EITHER accept or reject the
>favour, and I certainly resent any implication that if I am stupid enough
>to refuse to help them make money, I'll get what I deserve and it's
>perfectly ok if I have to spend an hour replying REJECT to 150 individual
>messages.
On the other hand, they could have simply subscribed to your lists without
bothering to ask first, and chances are you'd never have noticed. At least
they had the courtesy to ask.
And look at this from another point of view: I intend to allow them to
subscribe to my lists. If they changed their default, then I'd have to
manually process all their subscriptions, or send back a message saying
"Yes, it's OK for you to subscribe."
The question is, which is more common: list owners that are going to say
yes, or list owners that are going to say no? I think the former; if
that's true, then they chose the right default: the one that causes extra
work for the smallest number of people.
-Brent
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Brent Chapman | Great Circle Associates | 1057 West Dana Street
Brent@GreatCircle.COM | http://www.greatcircle.com | Mountain View, CA 94041
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