Thu, 19 Sep 1996 13:33:11 +0200
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On Wed, 18 Sep 1996 23:05:32 -0500 Winship <[log in to unmask]> said:
>Compared with the multifarious city, county, state and federal forms in
>the U.S. it is a model of clarity,
But it's a completely different situation. Some people don't think they
should have to use their brains unless (1) you're paying them by the hour
for that or (2) they want something very badly and using their brains is
the only way to get it. Most people want a tax break for their mortgage,
for instance, so they put up with 20 pages of fine print (or pay someone
to figure it out for them). People will get mail from the list just the
same if they type "Firstname Lastname" instead of their real name, so
they don't care.
>This is what I dislike about extracting the "name" from the From: field:
>there is no telling what you will get. Not infrequently it is not the
>form of the person's name desired (the comp. center set it up and I
>don't know how to change it but I don't like it),
If that's the case, what LISTSERV has on file in the REVIEW list that
very few people ever see is going to be the least of your worries.
>or the person knows how to change it and the "name" has work place,
>address, phone number, fax number, etc. All this sort of stuff can make
>total hash of the subscription list if one does a rev sorted by name.
You seem to care about this, but I'm afraid the subscriber doesn't. As a
matter of fact we had to add an option to let subscribers on even if they
don't supply a name in order to avoid losing major sales. One of the
customers in question made a survey of 3 days' worth of logs and
determined that 30% of people were unable to figure out the instructions
for adding their name to the SUBSCRIBE command! The customer agreed that
it wasn't because the instructions were unclear, and that the most likely
cause was that the customer's attention span was on the order of 30
seconds, but the bottom line is that spending $$$ on LISTSERV meant a net
loss of subscribers for no valid business reason. When the most important
metric for your service is the number of subscribers, it makes any other
solution preferable.
Eric
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