AG wrote:
James E. Lang wrote:
<snip>
One more thought on this slightly divergent topic: When responding to
the people who feel trapped on the list I think that we should send
our response to them off list rather than clutter the list with more
of the spitting contests. Maybe the first person to respond could
copy the list indicating that he/she will take responsibility to
guide the trapped person in finding his/her way off the list and then
try to be tactful in helping the person.
That would be a comical twist of fate if suddenly all of us "helpful,
polite, tactful, etc." subs to this list individually sent this person
unsub instructions *without* CC'ing the list!! Do you think the OP
would feel bombarded by kind offers of help? ;)
AG
I agree -- not copying the list leaves everybody wondering (if they care
at all) whether somebody is helping this person to unsubscribe.
Since this thread has sort of morphed into another version of the
"Unsubscribe" topic (besides having been hijacked by John Polko), let's
acknowledge that aspect.
The people who are asking to be unsubscribed somehow managed to
subscribe. How could they do that, and then (probably very soon after)
not know how to do (or be unable to do) the extremely parallel operation
of unsubscribing? It seems that in many cases the subscription mechanism
is being hidden from them, to the extent that the confirmation messages
sometimes can't even be handled by their e-mail clients (for instance,
the guy recently who couldn't just respond to the unsubscribe
confirmation because his client couldn't handle an embedded equals sign
in the To: field, which was there in the subscribe confirmation as
well). Third parties should not be able to accomplish that kind of
subscription, but how else can this be explained? I think I'm going to
try going off-list with some of these people to see if I can pin this
down. It's a major irritant to the unintentional subscriber and to the
list, as well as indicating that there's a hole in the process.
If somebody did knowingly subscribe, and somehow missed the connection
between the two actions, why did they subscribe? Were they following
some suggestion that they should subscribe to see the responses? If so,
where is that suggestion? If it's coming from list members, maybe we can
retrain them so they use the archive link idea instead. After all, that
allows somebody to see the responses without getting all the unrelated
messages -- if they don't really want to participate in the list, they
really shouldn't be subscribing. Otherwise, we need to find out what's
leading them to subscribe and tone it down somehow, at least warning
them of the volume of messages in the same context as the subscribe
mailto link. Again, maybe some off-list communications can dig this out.
I guess I'm volunteering to do that, too. If they ask their questions
without subscribing, the archive link should let them get the responses
fairly uncluttered by other stuff (except when hijacking and OT
meanderings occur, but at least they've got a chance -- and it beats
getting *everything*!).
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