Department names changed, or new chair/manager didn't like the old names
happened in our school.

On 6/24/2014 11:15 AM, Eric Thomas wrote:
>
> There is only one valid reason for renaming a discussion list: you are
> infringing on someone’s trademark (or got a court order or similar),
> and you /must /make the old name disappear no matter the consequences.
> In all other cases, renaming the list will make you look incompetent
> or worse because…
>
> 1.Subscribers have copies of messages with the old address in their
> mailboxes. They will hit reply and get a bounce and it will make you
> look incompetent… Or out of business.
>
> 2.All permalinks will stop working. Users will get a confusing error
> message and think you are having technical problems. They will keep
> retrying as suggested and when they see that the problem still isn’t
> solved after one week, they will wonder if you still have anyone
> working in your IT department.
>
> 3.All user bookmarks and address book entries will stop working.
> Depending on circumstances, users will get an HTTP error or an SMTP
> error or will end up at the server home page with no explanation.
>
> 4.At the press of a button you will turn all the positive publicity
> created about your list in community sites and so on, into negative
> publicity. People calling to complain that your link doesn’t work. You
> will find yourself googling links to the old address and writing to
> the managers of these sites to ask them to please change the link.
>
> 5.Pretty soon you will be installing IIS link rewrite plug-ins or
> reading up on Apache, to look for ways to at least mitigate the damage.
>
> This makes solid business sense if the alternative is getting sued for
> trademark infringement by a mega-corporation. Otherwise you just
> shouldn’t do it. You should look into using “List-ID=” and/or
> “List-Address=” to let the list operate under both “old” and “new”
> names. Barring that, you should create a new list and use “New-List=”
> in the old list.
>
> You should basically treat it like “renaming” a domain. There may come
> a time when you eventually want to drop the old name and think you can
> get away with it, but the first few weeks after the rename will be
> intense unless you kept the old name around and made sure it still worked.
>
>   Eric
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> To unsubscribe from the LSTSRV-L list, click the following link:
> http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-PEACH.exe?SUBED1=LSTSRV-L&A=1
>


############################

To unsubscribe from the LSTSRV-L list:
write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
or click the following link:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-PEACH.exe?SUBED1=LSTSRV-L&A=1