Am Mittwoch, den 14.09.2005, 14:26 -0400 schrieb Wayne T Smith:
> If you are interested in the convenience of your users, why not use
> passive probes?  The users never see them!
Currently the only thing I care about is the convenience of my users. If
they had a better user-interface, internationalization, etc. I'd have to
answer less support-requests.

Given the five issues I mentioned, the active probes are my least
concern. Basically I included them as an example that Listserv is
concerned about lists first and users second. The probes are a
list-issue and a list simply probes every user, so multiple lists send
multiple probes to a given user. Other products like mailman put the
user first and probe the user just once. That's much more convenient
from an end-user-point of view.

One more example for lists first, users second: if internationalization
is needed, every list-owner can provide his list-templates in a language
of his/her choice. Imagine a user subscribed to a German, an English and
a French mailinglist, who wants to change one of his/her options for
each list. The user will see a German, an English and a French
interface, depending on the list. Of course the user can be expected to
understand those languages, otherwise he/she would not have subscribed
to those lists in the first place... However, if it was a
mailman-installation, the user might choose his/her preferred language
and have the same interface for each mailinglist. To the end-user,
that's much more convenient.

Of course I admit that internationalization in a way conflicts with
listservs templating-system, which encourages the listowners to provide
an individual experience for each mailinglist. It is a conflict, because
usually a listowner will be unable to translate his templates to several
languages. So to the listowner, it is much more convenient not to have
internationalization....

Michael Loftis praised listservs templating capabilites, but I see it
differently. I suppose users to prefer consistent interfaces, which
suffer if everyone uses templates consistently, and to prefer i18n/l10n
which conflicts, as explained above. That's why I don't consider
mailmans limited templating-capabilities to be a major problem.

--
CU,
   Patrick.