Hello all:
My reason for sending the message that I did send was to find as many
members as possible to help me if they were able. I have been blacklisted
by Microsoft. I purchased my computer as a used computer and paid only
$200.00 for it. Microsoft wants me to pay 199.00 for new software, which is
out of the question form me financially.
In fact even if I could, I wouldn't pay that price for any new software
regardless of it source. I received the info to access the e-page of
openoffic.org from one of the techs. at my internet provider. I guess that
my questions are 1) can I get free software from OO; 2) if I can get
software from OO, then how do I go about it. 3) how do I install it (I'm all
thumbs when it comes to compuers), and finally how can I remove the pop-up
that comes up regularly and also how can I get rid of the permanent window
that comes up whenever I am online.
P.S. One final thing that comes to mind is that Microsoft seems to have
slowed down my server by about 33%.
Can anyone help?
Best regards,
John e. Polko.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Barbara Duprey" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2009 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: [users] Responding to unsubscribed posters
John Kaufmann wrote:
In a message dated 2009.11.01 11:11 -0500, Barbara Duprey wrote:
Just a thought -- there is a link that can be provided into the archives
for a particular thread. What if either (in order of preference) the
list manager, a moderator, or anybody on the list who knows how, sent a
message to the unsubscribed poster containing that link? The poster
would not have to subscribe (thereby getting what could potentially be a
dismaying number of messages -- and often leading to a "please
unsubscribe me" message). Yet they'd be able to follow the discussion,
wouldn't they, to see any responses on the thread?
Barbara, thanks for that reminder of why users are allowed to post
without subscribing - presumably someone has made the judgment that it is
more friendly to new users, in a paradigm that says a mailing list must
choose between:
(1) subscribing to post, subjecting a new user to many more emails than
those which address his question;
(2) posting without subscribing, which means the new user may not see the
answer to his question.
Most lists choose (1). This list chooses (2), and your elegant suggestion
tries to compensate for that well-intended but troublesome (and possibly
misguided) policy. But how and when would that be done? -
(a) Immediately when an unsubscribed user posts a question, in reply to
the original post? If so, how would the user know when the thread has
received a new post, including possibly an answer?
This is when I think it would be reasonable, and there is already a list
manager that could potentially do it automatically, and a moderator who
has to choose to allow the post and could also provide the link. I agree
that the user would have to keep checking back to see if anything useful
has been said, but they could be told to do this, and they'd have the link
to make it easy. I think this is preferable to having the forced
subscription, because the volume of mail heere tends to dismay many
newbies and most of what they'd see would not be pertinent to their
specific question. The response that includes the link could say something
like, "To see any further discussion relative to your post, keep checking
this link (....); you will not automatically receive the responses. If you
would like to participate in other aspects of the mailing list, like
following other topics and perhaps responding to questions from others as
you become more familiar with OpenOffice.org, please consider subscribing
to the list by sending an e-mail to [email protected]. Note
that this list typically receives 20 to 40 posts each day, and it is
recommended that you set your e-mail client to send this traffic to a
mailbox separate from your normal mail." If the list manager did this, we
wouldn't have to worry about who's subscribed or not, and the list
wouldn't have to see this boilerplate at all. If the moderator did it, the
list should be copied so we'd know it had happened. Otherwise, one of us
who has an easy way to see if the user is subscribed, and can cite the
link, could reply, copying the list.
(b) Each time something is posted in that thread? If we can do that, why
not just (or also) forward the post?
That latter alternative (b) seems to require a mechanism to keep track of
posts by unsubscribed users and, when a post comes to the list, not only
forward it to the subscribed list, but also check it against another list
of unsubscribed posts for special handling. That sent me to the ezmlm
manual <http://www.ezmlm.org/manual/> to see what is possible within the
package without extension. I did not find a good handle on this, but
there are lots of people who know much more about both ezmlm and database
programming, so maybe it's easier than I suppose.
This sounds like an undesirable increase in overhead, and either too much
manual handling, or changes to the list management that have been
discussed many times here with no resolution. I've forwarded posts in the
past when they seem to have useful answers for the poster, but as you have
seen, some people object to this for various reasons. So the compromise
position seems to be a post calling the responder's attention to the fact
that the OP was not subscribed. Responders who are aware of the situation
generally copy the OP directly, but that's pretty easy to forget, even if
you know about it. Hence all sorts of additional list traffic....
I would love to see a solution to this problem, because it would probably
also go far toward alleviating the other problem that takes up far too
much of the list bandwidth: Unsubscribing, or as called most recently,
"CANCELLATION". The irony is that a list policy that may be designed to
avoid burdening new users with lots of irrelevant (to them) emails has
the effect of burdening the whole list with lots of irrelevant (to
everyone) emails. There has to be a better way.
John
I'm really hoping the initial response above is a better solution! By the
way, the "CANCELLATION" post was atypical in that it came from an account
that was not itself subscribed, but apparently was getting the e-mails via
forwarding or some other means. Most of these are from people who should
probably never have subscribed in the first place, and didn't really
understand the consequences, but did not know any other way to get
responses. (And also didn't read the "Welcome" e-mail, but that's another
story....)
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