On 11:02 PM 5/19/01, Darron Froese wrote:
>On 5/17/01 2:20 AM, "N6REJ" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> Hello all.
>> Pardon me for really sounding lame, but I'm having a heck of a time finding
>> any documentation that explains how to modify mailman so that it will
answer
>> for vhosts also.
>
>Everything you need has been posted to the list multiple times.
Apparently you assume the person is subscribed to the list, which isn't
necessarily true (and if you have been subscribed for any length of time
you would obviously know this because the open nature of this list has been
a hot topic of discussion in the not-too-distant-past). Then you assume
the person has been subscribed for long enough to have seen the question
pass by, which is pretty likely to be false (or else, why ask the question
at all?). Finally, if you think saying "go search the list archives before
posting" is a good rebuttal to my 2 items above, why don't you try doing it
yourself and then see if it's an answer? (Note, the search function has
been fixed somewhat since I wrote this, but is still flawed in that you
need specific instructions on how to search to get good results.) (And
then think about how a *non-subscriber* is supposed to even know of the
existence or location of the archives in the first place...)
This list has a lot of traffic problems created by "how people find and
post to the list".
The first problem is that it's regularly used in place of a FAQ because no
one has made a FAQ readily available (in the way the list posting address
is readily available). Solution? Link to the FAQ pages before giving out
the list email address on the mailman website (give out the email address
only at the bottom of a FAQ TOC page) and link to the FAQ in the readme,
instead of giving out this address. <jc waves her hand and offers to help
compile an official FAQ if using the unofficial FAQs that already exist
isn't acceptable>
The second problem is that the list archives are not easily or readily
searchable (recently fixed, somewhat), so if the question isn't a
"frequently asked" one, but the answer *is* somewhere in the archives, it
isn't easily found, so we get the question here again. Solution? Better
archive search feature. Again, link to the "search the archives" page
first, before giving out the "post to the list" address.
The third problem is that the software itself doesn't clearly encourage
people to read the FAQs and webpages that already exist before posting to
this list. For instance, the excellent website at:
<http://www.aurora.edu/~ckolar/mailman/>
is found in the readme, but not on the mailman website, while the email
address for posting to this list is found on the website, in fact it's on
the website's homepage. When you install mailman you may install it in a
different location from where you uncompressed it. If so, the readme will
remain where you uncompressed it and NOT be included in the install
directory, so you will have a harder time *finding* the readme when you are
poking around in your installed mailman files looking for
answers. Solution? The readme needs to be put with the install files
when the program is installed, and needs to point to web-accessible
solutions before giving people an email address to ask that which has
already been asked, (and answered, and is readily available if we would
just LINK TO IT and point people to it!).
Finally, since I happen to have a local archive of posts to this list since
I subscribed, I quickly searched my archive and forwarded 2 posts to the OP
(including one that was written by Darron and posted to this list a few
days ago) that will hopefully help get him pointed in the correct
direction. See how helpful and easy that was?
jc
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