On Fri, 7 Jan 2000 15:40:19 -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:
>> For anyone who sorts their messages by subject, the two 'threads' would be
>> merged.
> Tough luck. Doesn't mean there should be coddling for it.
<cough> Err, I beg you a pardon?? I beg to interject here. I
believe every man should have the liberty to do whatever he wants to
himself or for himself, but one has to stick a pin when the man does
something which is to the detriment of innocent others.
IOW, if user X, in the spirit of being human, fails to fill in the
subject and messes up a thread, many innocents will suffer for it. This is
different from you sitting at your own terminal, in the privacy of your
home, and deleting an entire partition. I don't care about the latter
happening to you because you didn't get a warning message. It's your
partition, your mess up, your waterloo. Everyone is else is sleeping while
you are spending all night dealing with it. :) However, I do care about
you messing up my and other innocent peoples threads. Because of this I am
in support of putting the subject reminder there to help others make up
for their human nature. I see it in the same light as a spell-checker.
It's a courtesy move. Some don't like spellcheckers and therefore disable
them. Disable the subject reminder if you like, but don't prevent others
from trying to compensate for the annoyingly natural and incurable habit
of humans to overlook or forget things, especially things that may impact
upon innocent others. That's one of the joys of computing.
> Let me give you an example of how little chance you have of getting me to
> "See the light." I have, in my professional career, deleted the root
> partition of a mail server for a local ISP. For 5 *HOURS* I was at work after
> that mistake rebuilding the machine while mail service was served solely by
> the backup mail server. It was all because I entered the wrong directory and
> did the "rm -rf" command.
That's an anecdote and the decision for a software developer to
include confirmation popup dialog boxes or confirmation messages is based
on the usership's, and not just one users tendencies. Confirmation
messages for major deletions are placed there because the incidence of
major mistakes are high and the loss as result of these deletions far
outweigh that of having to deal with the confirmation messages/dialogs.
The fact that I or you work with precision and make few mistakes
where deletions are concerned, is pretty much besides the point. For those
who require the increased productivity (indirectly) through these
confirmatory messages, they are just as important additions to the product
as any other. But please, make them optional because people improve/mature
and others just never seem to need them. I'm one of the latter who is
suffering in the Windows world where this is concerned. :)))
> 99.99% of the time I do enter a subject. I don't need something to
> catch the .01% special case for me. I'll deal with the consequences
> when they come up as that is the path of least work.
Stop being anecdotal. You've asked me to do the same before. :)
> Unless there is a very good reason for putting it in in the first
> place, don't put it in. It's that simple. Not every program needs
> every little bell and whistle and foofie reminder as an option!
Sure. I don't think anyone is arguing this. A subject header
reminder is not a foofie. It can prevent messing up threads among other
things. If you fill in your subject headers, you'll never see the popup
message.
I never saw the popup message when using Agent. :)
> It does do harm. It is more space take up on the options menu,
> another nag for people to get annoyed at, more time spent away from
> developing the core client, more code and executable bloat. That is
> certainly not doing no harm.
In Agent, there's a options menu page called 'confirmations'.
There you may enable or disable confirmation messages supported by the
program, and guess what, the subject header notification message is one of
the few not made optional. I mean, after all, it's a newsreader, and all
messages posted to newsgroups should have a subject. :) Now *that's* an
application for humans. :)
--
-=Allie=- | Using The Bat! v1.38e
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | Windows NT 4.0 (Service Pack 6)
[ Bad command. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaay! ]
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