At 1:02 AM -0400 10/14/99, John R Levine wrote:
> * The majordomo kind, where you have to send back a cookie that's a hash of
> the subscriber's address,
or more correctly, majordomo 1.94.3. and yes, it's a huge problem,
because the auth line is simply too long, and mailers that word-wrap
die badly, and leave users clueless why. I looked at fixing majordomo
to read the second line, but the code is, um, not enthusiastic about
being changedc.
> * A cookie that the server remembers, which I originally wrote for
> soc.religion.unitarian-univ, the original robomoderated newsgroup and for
> abuse.net.
the majordomo2 concept, and also backported to 1.93.4 (or perhaps
patched into... I've got the sources around here and I can't remember
which). Much, much nicer than auth lines. But stll fairly easy for
naive users to get wrong, especially new users who don't read what
you send them. On one list I run, we did this for a while -- and had
40% dropout rates. Mostly because new users just didn't, or didn't
realize they needed to.
(it's important to remember that we now have a growing population of
users who understand web stuff better than email, unlike us old
pharts. And many are scared and/or intimidated by email stuff and
listserver stuff. So the more you look at dealing with these folks,
the less complicated you need to make things...)
> * The web kind, with a URL in the confirmation message that you click to
> confirm. I'm moving to these,
me to. On some of my lists, soon you'll have no way to subscribe via
email. I expect eventually all will be that way. And so the default
unsub will be via web, as will confirms. I do plan on keeping an
email "panic button" unsubscribe, but you can make it SO simple for
users by going to the web and using embedded links and customized
email and the like... In fact, I'm soon going to modify my "welcome"
message to include a customized link to an unsubscribe web page with
the name pre-encoded.....
--
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
What was that?
French horns...
