Department names changed, or new chair/manager didn't like the old names happened in our school.
There is only one valid reason for renaming a discussion list: you are infringing on someone’s trademark (or got a court order or similar), and you
must make the old name disappear no matter the consequences. In all other cases, renaming the list will make you look incompetent or worse because…
1.
Subscribers have copies of messages with the old address in their mailboxes. They will hit reply and get a bounce and it will make you look incompetent… Or out of business.
2.
All permalinks will stop working. Users will get a confusing error message and think you are having technical problems. They will keep retrying as suggested and when they see that the problem still isn’t solved after one week, they will
wonder if you still have anyone working in your IT department.
3.
All user bookmarks and address book entries will stop working. Depending on circumstances, users will get an HTTP error or an SMTP error or will end up at the server home page with no explanation.
4.
At the press of a button you will turn all the positive publicity created about your list in community sites and so on, into negative publicity. People calling to complain that your link doesn’t work. You will find yourself googling
links to the old address and writing to the managers of these sites to ask them to please change the link.
5.
Pretty soon you will be installing IIS link rewrite plug-ins or reading up on Apache, to look for ways to at least mitigate the damage.
This makes solid business sense if the alternative is getting sued for trademark infringement by a mega-corporation. Otherwise you just shouldn’t do it. You should look into using “List-ID=” and/or “List-Address=” to let the list operate
under both “old” and “new” names. Barring that, you should create a new list and use “New-List=” in the old list.
You should basically treat it like “renaming” a domain. There may come a time when you eventually want to drop the old name and think you can get away with it, but the first few weeks after the rename will be intense unless you kept
the old name around and made sure it still worked.
Eric
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