>Oh, come on Eric, how can you make a statement like that? Maybe people >can't find what they need in the manual People keep complaining about that, and I am not working on the assumption that they are lying to us for some hidden purpose, I am assuming that they do indeed find the manual daunting. It is a frequent complaint and the people who have helped us proofread the first of the new manuals have been very positive. Maybe *you* do not have a problem with the manual, but this is not something I made up. >So does that mean everything you put into Listserv has to meet your >threshold of what's appropriate or else it's considered -- your word -- >"stupid?" Every company with significantly more than 2-3 employees needs to make at least semi-formal decisions about what to include and what not to include in the product. There are a lot of reasons why a particular feature may not be included, the most common is prioritizing but there are other issues. Some features violate RFCs or can cause problems for OTHER customers without negatively impacting the one requesting the feature. Anyway, the bottom line is that not every feature can be implemented, and someone has got to make that decision. Frankly I don't see why you find it shocking that personally I only add features when I think they meet a certain threshold of usefulness, customer appeal, whatever you want to call it. If the implementation time is significant, by providing the feature I am failing to provide another feature which was formally planned (and may have been promised to another customer, usually several other customers in fact). In most companies, the policy is that you have a "to do" list and a wish list, that items on the "to do" list do not get displaced without a really good reason, and that there is some kind of procedure for wish list items to make it to the "to do" list, by default at the bottom. A customer who lost the source code to a key custom application is not ordinarily considered sufficient cause to disrupt the "to do" list, and makes it to the wish list instead. Like most issues that affect only one customer, it tends to get a low priority because the maximum kickback is one sale. Sometimes it does get done, for instance LISTSERV has code to avoid folding a line of text between "XYZ" and "Inc.", which was not a trivial change and led to other features not making it into the product in the same time frame. It was a sound business decision based on the size of the prospect. But usually these features never make it to the "to do" list because all the other features with comparable implementation time have a much higher expected kickback than a single sale. Technical people often call these features "stupid" because they are really one site's problem, and technically they ought to be solved differently, not by expecting off-the-shelf products to have knowledge of highly specific local problems. >I am sure the others who have discussed on >LSTOWN-L their wish for such a feature will chip in a few bucks, too, for a >quarter hour of your brainpower. :) This will not help, what you need to do is make tomorrow last 24h and 15 minutes :-) Take Microsoft for instance, don't you think Gates would gladly write a $100M check for NT 5.0 to be ready today, if only he could??? >In all, I am somewhat dismayed by what appears from your post to be >L-soft's complacent perspective on the development and feature addition >issue. All right John, I'll implement your feature if you can find me another comparable software company (NOT a basement company) which, unlike L-Soft, implements any and all changes on the assumption that if customers require them, they just have to be implemented ASAP :-) Eric