It was 8/12/02 2:26 pm when Richard Kenward wrote: > This directive of not including email addresses in postings is obviously > tripping up a lot of good people and frankly one does have to ask the > question....Does having an Archive really warrant this level of > aggravation? The list owner made the directive for very valid reasons > which I am sure most of us support, but is the price worth paying? Who > is using the archive, is it really of value to listees? > > Can we have a brief discussion of this 'on list' rather that replying > privately so that we can give it a good public airing? Next week's list > mum may want to curtail it so please take this opportunity <BG>
Richard As long as you setup your email client to not include the email address when you hit Reply, it takes no time or effort at all. I think you can only put a value on the archives once they have been available for a period of 3-4 months and members have got used to accessing them or being constantly pointed to them. It should be possible to have some statistics that tell you when the archives have been accessed and then decide whether to keep them or not. Even if that's not possible, if the archives are available on the Web, non-members should also be able to find them by doing a search on Google and that can prove valuable to someone and can also attract new members. Old habits die hard. I would give the members some time to adjust. When I joined some of the Adobe forums recently, I was pulled up very quickly by one member who didn't want his email address to be used for junk mail. It was the first time I'd seen such an objection but I could see his point once I realised why he didn't want his email quoted in the body of another post. I think more and more lists will require you not to quote other people's addresses when quoting. Lists used to be OK as they tended to keep the archives for members only but now they're on par with newsgroups. If posting to a newsgroup, something I rarely do, I always put Delete in my reply address so that if someone quotes my address it will be useless. However, you cannot do that with lists as the server will just not allow you to post. So my vote is to keep the archives and ask the members to NOT quote another member's address in the body of the post. If someone wants to put their email address in the body of the email, that's their affair but I'm all for other people not quoting my address. My tupence worth.... --/ Shangara Singh http://www.e-pixel.co.uk Adobe Certified Expert ~ Photoshop 7.0 PortfoliosOnCD for Photographers http://www.portfoliosoncd.com =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
