[plug] unsubscibe ATTN: LIST OWNER

[Christian]

On Sun, Mar 25, 2001 at 03:49:22PM +0800, The Thought Assassin wrote:
 
> How were you planning on filtering people who can't even spell
> "unsubscribe", Bernard? :)
> 
> > or simply attach the line: "To unsubscribe <do this>"
> > as a footer to every message? 100 bytes x what 300 users?... 30 kb.
> > Think of the bandwidth it'd save in the bitching going on.
> 
> It's not per user, it's per post. Even if it prevented the problem, it
> would waste more bandwidth than it saves. In reality, it doesn't even
> solve the problem. I speak from experience of other lists that do this,
> and I'm sure others here will be nodding their heads. If people aren't
> going to read what you send them, it doesn't matter how or how often you
> send it. *sigh*. I don't think this problem has an easy solution, short of
> not letting people who won't read doco onto the list in the first place,
> and that kind of defeats one of the major purposes of the list. (teaching
> people how and where to look for appropriate doco, and how to use it)

Spot on.  My proposal is that, in order to join the list, the person has
to:
  1. Send an email to a certain address with the "subscribe" request.
     The email will be rejected with an appropriate (rude?) message if they
     send HTML.
  2. Read the instructions in the response they get to learn how to
     complete the subscription process.  In particular it tells them how to
     unsubscribe and makes it really clear that if they stuff it up then they
     won't be all that popular.  The instructions to complete subscription
     must require that the person read all of the email (an exercise left to
     the readership) and not be too hard while still requiring actual
     *thought*.
  3. The subscription completion process also represents an agreement to
     endeavour to abide by some informal code of conduct for the list which I
     think is already established.

It won't necessarily solve the problem but it will hopefully help.

All emails accusing me of attempting to create a police state to
/dev/null please.

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