Hiya, Spike, I think that's true, When I started on listservs nobody could do anything to their account without a helpful admin. Mostly the mods couldn't do diddly when it came to accounts. We couldn't change notification settings without an act of Congress, either -- the notion of setting your account so that you didn't get email notification or only got it once a day was not an option that came up.
Though my recollection is also that back in the day, by the time it reached the point that somebody posted a "get me off this list" it was more in the nature of a protest action, having sent multiple emails or PMs to the admins who did not respond. But thank heaven for the do it yourself era, it has saved me a lot of time. I also think that as these things have changed, our notions of what is and is not private has changed, as has (as you rightly say) what is and is not the role of an admin. I know a number of people who consider offlist contact annoying and/or inconvenient. Particularly the ones whose problem is that they are getting too many emails. I contacted a woman to let her know that she could either turn them off altogether or just get one a day or one a week or whatever she liked and was the recipient of a rather unpleasant return email suggesting my IQ was lower than room temperature as I responded to her problem of too many emails by sending her an email. She was not incorrect, I just didn't see it that way. I expect that in this case, somebody not-an-admin saw the problem first and suggested a solution in the easiest way possible -- by responding as the request was made. It's a worldwide list and not everybody is in the same time zone. Sometimes you have to wait for the nearest admin to wake up. :-) Happily, unhelpful ridicule has not been much of a problem on this particular list, the couple times it has come up it has been pretty effectively sat upon thus far. The biggest problem in my mind is autoresponders when folks go on vacation and they are mildly annoying and mostly sort of funny. Laters, Jeannine On Feb 17, 5:31 am, "Chris Foote (Spike)" <sp...@tenbus.co.uk> wrote: > Interesting subtle change in the way that listervs have been run over > the years. > > In the past when a subscriber to a list sent a "please get me off this > list" one of the admins would deal with it and contact the individual > *off list*. > > These days it seems to be the norm to send messages to people and all > the other subscribers telling them how to do it themselves. On another > Google Group (that I will not mention) the potential subscriber was > subjected to a torrent of unhelpful ridicule from other members. > > This Google Group has over 3000 subscribers and five admins - could one > of them not have contacted the person concerned - off-list - and dealt > with it privately. > > This change in the way that "list moms" see their role does not confine > itself to this Google Group, I'm seeing it more and more in other places > too. > > Spike > > > > > > > > Tara Hunt wrote: > > Sheila, > > > This is google groups...you can remove yourself...please see the > > signature line below every email. > > > On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 5:13 PM, sheila sookram > > <sheilasookram122...@yahoo.com <mailto:sheilasookram122...@yahoo.com>> > > wrote: > > > please remove this email from this group.... it is overloading my > > account... > > Sheila -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to coworking@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.
