On Sat, 12 Dec 1998, Vince Sabio wrote:

> ;-)
>
> Now c'mon, kids ... when I first read Michael Johnson's post on this
> subject, I kept waiting for the punch line.

Now that this thread is finally ending, I'd like to say that I'm a little
surprised at the reaction my posting got, and would like to apologize for
instigating it.  True, there was no punch line because I was seriously
looking for an answer to that question.  I noticed that this list was
being used by list owners looking for information about LISTSERV's
functionality, and to report what they thought might be bugs.  Although no
one on my mailing list has ever complained about the gender specificity of
the LISTSERV messages (all of my list co-owners are male), as a software
test engineer, I look at things differently, trying to get into the mind
of many different kinds of users and imagine what their impression of a
particular software product would be.  I thought this was what in my
company we call a "content bug": not a technical or functional error, but
the equivalent of a typo in the user interface of a product.

The situation that brought this up involved a subscriber to my list who
used a gender-ambiguous pseudonym and address.  There are many such, but
while I was idly asking myself which gender this person could be, I
noticed that a LISTSERV message referring to this subscriber used the male
pronoun.  There were two ways I could have reacted to this: (1) ooh,
LISTSERV is biased towards males!, and (2) wow, LISTSERV has information
about this subscriber that I do not have!.  Apparently, I should not have
reacted in manner number 1.  Not that LISTSERV is omniscient, either, but
perhaps #2 would have been a more productive and less controversial
question to ask of you.


For future reference, do you believe that this would have been a better
question to put to [log in to unmask]  Or are bug reports (or suspected
bugs) on-topic for this list?


I suspect that everyone would appreciate it if any and all followups to
this thread were directed at me via private e-mail.


Thank you for your interesting feedback on this matter, and your patience
with me,

-- Michael S. Johnson   Miyazaki Web and Mailing List Owner
   [log in to unmask]   www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/mailing-list