[Mailman-Users] Switch to quarterly reminders

[Chuq Von Rospach]

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:

1) unsubscribe/help information in the footer of every message.

2) regular postings.

3) 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 at plaidworks.com -- http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/

Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties
are largely ceremonial.