Dan Lester wrote:

>At 04:14 PM 12/21/97 -0600, Adam Bailey wrote:
>>Very much agreed. I'm always curious about that, and I always Query
>>someone when they ask to be deleted. When someone signs off themselves, I
>>find myself wondering if I'm losing a long time lurker or just someone
>>who subscribed and changed their mind. This would be very handy.
>
>Why does it matter?  It is YOUR list.  What reason the other guy had
>doesn't really affect you, does it?

It very well might.  If they are leaving because they object to certain
policies of yours as list owner, you might want to know what those
policies were which caused them to leave the list, sort of as a way to get
feedback from them as to how you might be able to make your list more
friendly for future people to join.  As list owner, we are not immune to
making mistakes, and there has been at least one time in my very short
list-ownership (I've only been a list owner since June of this year) that
I truly feel that I was the one to havemade the mistake, and it was
helpful to me to have a dialogue with the person who had unsubscribed
because it gave me a better feel for how I might try and deal with any
similar situations in the future.  In this particular circumstance, it was
not at all clear to me why this person had unsubscribed, and since my list
is a very close knit group of people, when one person leaves, it can
become quite noticable.

>If s/he doesn't like your topic, your
>list style, or anything else, you aren't gonna change it for one person,
>are you?

That depends on whether or not you feel like you made a serious error in
list ownership policy for your particular list.  In my case, I was
convinced that my poor decision had caused this particular person to leave
my list.  In fact, it turned out that it was not my list-ownership
policies alone, but a whole bunch of other things which I could not have
been aware of at the time.

And yes, if I felt like I made such a poor decision as list owner to have
caused some people to leave, I would want to change my list ownership
policy to try and prevent that from happening in the future, if I can.

Being that my list is rather small, I xcan afford to make these kinds of
decisions this way.  For larger lists, the list-owner may not have that
kind of option or desire to find out what, if anything, went wrong with
their list ownership policy with any individual member of the list.

>Even magazines that you dfrop after a year don't bother asking
>you why, and they're in it for the money, which most of us aren't.

But they are quite eager to send you a request to rejoin their magazine a
few months later.  Yes, they are in it for the money, but they don't like
losing customers either.

>cheers
>
>dan

Glenn