At 2:09 PM EDT on June 27 Nollaig MacKenzie sent off:
> Has this ever been tried for some Cool Software:
* see below.
> Create two lists:
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> And etiquette requires that if you are fairly newbile you send your question
Newbile? I don't think I was ever newbile... ;-)
> to CoolSoftwareNewbies and wait a reasonable time before construing the
> absence of answer as an indication that you should send it to
> CoolSoftwareUsers?
It wouldn't even have to be etiquette; a >= 3 day old newbie subscription could
be required before being allowed to join the user list. But I don't think we
need it.
* Yes, sort of, for a certain MUA called mutt, with mutt-users and mutt-dev.
After all aren't newbies a subset of users? And although I know mutt is for
power users, complete newbies by definition don't. They're offered a choice of
mailers as they install their UNIX distribution and what do they know? elm and
pine are trees and mutt isn't. As somebody who keeps trying to get his wife to
give up her wretched Windoze GUI mailer for mutt, I don't want to chase away
the people who get here on their own. But I think we need a netiquette lesson
on the web page for subscribing to mutt-users, maybe even with a link to
procmail so they can handle the mailing list, and the lesson should also be
included in the list subscription confirmation message, before the cookie so
that they have to read it.
The lesson should include:
1. Try pressing ? in mutt. Right now. Wasn't that great? It gets better.
Try / and you'll probably answer your question.
(I really think it's much better to tell people this than RTFM. Lusers already
know they should RTFM (even if they don't know the acronym) but either figure
they can get you to do it or honestly tried and failed to find something that
seems intuitive to experts. ? is so fast that they might actually try it, and
it should be intuitive enough.)
2. The manual location and a suggestion to grep it.
3. The mailing list archive URLs.
4. An invitation to go ahead and post if 1, 2, and 3 didn't satisfy, with the
caveat that such shockingly offensive reasons for not being satisfied by 1,
2, and 3 as "I'm at work, so I don't have time to read the manual myself"
are plain and simple flamebait.
Or maybe there should be a mutt-newbie RPM that detects any attempt to mail to
mutt-users and replaces it with ?/ Somewhere near the end of the resulting
page there could be a key sequence for really posting to mutt-users.
--
Police, n. An armed force for protection and participation. - A. Bierce
Robert I. Reid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/
PGP Key: http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/pgp.html
