At 5/18/2000 08:26 PM -0500, Troy Frericks wrote or quoted:
> >
>Don't burry it in the header, don't require them to keep something, don't
>require them to remember a web site, just attach the information to the
>end of each message; then those stupid people will feel real stupid if
>they miss it.
Actually, they won't. I've seen this kind of setup on a list devoted to
Winamp skin creation; the overall intelligence level there was *much* lower
than this list, and every single email had a footer saying "To unsubscribe,
send a blank email to [some address I don't remember]."
Roughly a half-dozen people *per day* sent in messages asking how to get
off the list. When the footer was pointed out to them, some just vanished,
a few apologized and then vanished, and quite a few sent back messages
saying things like "Well, how was I supposed to notice *that*?!? It's all
the way at the bottom of the message!"
People who are determined to be stupid seem to be:
a) 100% capable of being stupid, no matter how easy you try to make it
for them to be smart (or at least average); and
b) 100% incapable of being convinced that they're being stupid. They
will rationalize and justify nearly anything.
I used to think that a footer would be worth trying, until I saw that
Winamp skins list. I now think it would be nearly useless. (OTOH, the
bandwidth consumed wouldn't be *that* much, so I'm not as much against it
as some on this list.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Kai MacTane
System Administrator
Online Partners.com, Inc.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
From the Jargon File: (v4.0.0, 25 Jul 1996)
finger trouble /n./
Mistyping, typos, or generalized keyboard incompetence (this is
surprisingly common among hackers, given the amount of time they
spend at keyboards). "I keep putting colons at the end of statements
instead of semicolons", "Finger trouble again, eh?".
