> > I guess the sort message is that I understand your complaint, but I > > think the alternative is worse--manually pasting in a user's address on > > almost every message. > > Yeah, it gets a little tiresome hearing the same old ill-founded plea > for mucking up a Reply-To header for the benefit of those who'd rather > not think before replying. There are very good reasons for not putting > in this header, which have been discussed before. >
Maybe a brief message should be put in the footer of the email that states how the list works. I subscribe to numerous lists and most use the alternative technique of making the default reply-to the list. I'm not saying I like one or the other, but a simple rule of usability is to make it clear. BTW, After I replied to the first message on the list, I realized why the FAQ was careful to mention that authors get upset when people send messages directly to them. However, I did not gather from that topic that the default behavior of the reply button on mailing list messages was to send directly to the original poster. Therefore it may warrant an entry in the FAQ or on the page where the mailing list subscription information is. > What gets me is that the simple logic of the way it's done now is lost > on people. It's so intuitive: when you hit Reply, you reply to the > sender, and when you hit Reply-to-all (or Group-reply) you reply to the > whole list. Why is this so difficult to grasp? > ... All it takes is a second > to ask yourself, before hitting Reply, "to whom do I want to send this?" > This type of phrase is a clear indication that your product (in this case, the mailing list) violates some common usability rules. Usability is not always based on logic, but on expectations. People expect A to happen, but instead they get B. Therefore they complain. It doesn't matter how logical it should be. I once made a graphic on a webpage that said "Click here to submit your form" thinking that an image with a long piece of text would be a lot less confusing to novice users. I got numerous complaints about this graphic. People called me nearly every day saying, "I saw your form but I couldn't find the submit button..." People expected a button, not a graphic with text on it. I replaced it with a standard submit button and have never gotten a single complaint. Asking for people to take an extra second to think about what they're doing before they do it is unreasonable. :-) If people did that, the world population would be much smaller, credit card debt would be much lower, and no one would have bought a thigh-master. Matt Nuzum _______________________________________________ htdig-general mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, send a message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with a subject of unsubscribe FAQ: http://htdig.sourceforge.net/FAQ.html
