Re: [Mailman-Users] Switch to quarterly reminders
On Fri, 8 Nov 2002 10:44:35 -0800 Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote:
Monthly is traditional, but I think it's worthy of some thought. With the List-* headers in the message, and the footer that traditionally points to the info pages (and with 2.1, that can be customized to the user), do we still need to send out reminders monthly?
Writing as an admin: Yes, I like and want the monthly reminders and I don't want them any less frequent. Why? I'm fairly convinced that they save me from, "unsubscribe me!" messages. Certainly my rate of such messages has collapsed since I moved to mailman, and I've a burst of unsubscribes every month immediately after the reminders go out.
--
J C Lawrence
---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw@kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
On Friday, November 8, 2002, at 02:35 PM, J C Lawrence wrote:
Writing as an admin: Yes, I like and want the monthly reminders and I don't want them any less frequent. Why? I'm fairly convinced that they save me from, "unsubscribe me!" messages.
I rank the usefulness of these things this way:
unsubscribe/help information in the footer of every message.
regular postings.
the List-* headers (because they're new, people don't expect them, and MUA's don't make them easily available yet. Long term, they're the answer, once everyone buys into them)
Certainly my rate of such messages has collapsed since I moved to mailman, and I've a burst of unsubscribes every month immediately after the reminders go out.
I'd argue it's more likely the footer for discussion lists. I did some experimenting with regular postings a few years ago (way pre-mailman), and found that there wasn't much difference between posting bi-weekly, monthly, and not at all, at least in terms of helping the casual user. They don't keep a copy of it, so it's never there when they want it (so they simply blat at the list). And the more often you post it, the more likely people simply tune it out as noise. That's one reason why I started experimenting with footer language instead, and pre-mailman, simply stopped sending regular postings. It just seemed like they were mostly bit-bucketed.
Where they come in handy, I think, are digest users and lists with infrequent postings. the busier a list, the less the monthly posting probably matters. The less frequently a list is used, the more it's useful just as a "hi, rmember us?" thing, since people can get out of the habit of using a mail list. But it also is a reminder to them they'd meant to unsubscribe...
Personally, I think monthly is "about right". I'm not ready to do away with them, especially since 2.1 can hook the bounce systme into them. but I'm still unsure just what good they do, either.
-- Chuq Von Rospach, Architech chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/
Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
Hi!
On Fri, 08 Nov 2002, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
Where they come in handy, I think, are digest users and lists with infrequent postings. the busier a list, the less the monthly posting probably matters. The less frequently a list is used, the more it's useful just as a "hi, rmember us?" thing, since people can get out of the habit of using a mail list. But it also is a reminder to them they'd meant to unsubscribe...
Then, an additional setting smiimilar to the digest frequency (i.e. send reminders out every N normal posts) might be handy.
Just my $0.02
Greets, Tobias
-- A program that can't tolerate empty input vastly overestimates the real world's interest in what it's doing. (Tim Peters in comp.lang.python)
participants (3)
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Chuq Von Rospach -
J C Lawrence -
Tobias Klausmann