On Tue, Feb 16, 1999 at 06:18:26PM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> > No, it's not. The overwhelming majority of Internet users cannot
> > handle such simple tasks as subscribing/unsubscribing, removing
> > boilerplate text (signatures, message headers/footers), correctly
> > attributing quoted material, etc.
>
> Bogus. I run really huge lists for really naive users, and even in
> THOSE populations my error rates are quite small. It isn't an
> overwhelming majority. it's not even a majority.
I can only report to what I've observed, and what I have observed
is that on the lists I run, and on those which I participate, many
users have terrible problems with all of these tasks -- tasks which I
consider rudimentary and mostly obvious.
Now, I haven't attempted a quantitative study to characterize the
frequency of various kinds of errors and/or to correlate that to
the user's experience. And to be honest, I'm probably not patient
enough to do that anyway. So I won't argue the point as to what
the percentage rate is, because I don't know.
What I do know is that the combination of (a) putting basic list
information in the headers AND the footers of every message sent
plus (b) adding filtering in majordomo *still* doesn't catch all
of the ingenious ways by which the clueless try to unsubscribe,
and (c) sending an introductory message to all list members when
they join and every 90 days doesn't seem to help much and (d) conforming
as closely as possible to all Internet standards that I'm aware of
(i.e. honoring -request, and so on) doesn't seem to help, and (e) giving
pointers to other documentation -- written by other people, in case
my particular writing style isn't suitable -- doesn't seem to help.
I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there are a lot of
stupid/lazy people out there who won't RTFM, won't RTFFAQ, and won't even
read a one-line instruction that's repeatedly put in front of their face.
I see no reason to indulge them, so I don't.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
