Department names changed, or new chair/manager didn't like the old names happened in our school. On 6/24/2014 11:15 AM, Eric Thomas wrote: > > 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 > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > To unsubscribe from the LSTSRV-L list, click the following link: > http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-PEACH.exe?SUBED1=LSTSRV-L&A=1 > ############################ To unsubscribe from the LSTSRV-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-PEACH.exe?SUBED1=LSTSRV-L&A=1