[Tfug] Technical harassment, or "Computer knowledge is more important than anything else in the world."

[Christopher Robbins]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:15:26, Chris Niswander <cn.tfug.account at bitboost.com>
wrote:
>
> At 06:54 PM 2/27/2006 -0800, you wrote:
> >
> >--- Christopher Robbins <robbinsc at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Technically, they had to navigate the site to
> >> subscribe to the list....In
> >> theory, shouldn't one be able to navigate to the
> >> same place they subscribed
> >> to the list to UNsubscribe from the list?
> >
> >Agreed.  Put a filter on the list to reject messages
> >with "unsubscribe" in the sbject/body.  When a person
> >keeps getting mail from the list and his/her
> >unsubscribe pleas are unanswered, he/she will
> >*eventually* get motivated to solve his/her own
> >problem!
>
> I always love it when some computer-illiterate person
> has no idea how to resolve some problem, and they
> get constructive reactions like this.
>
> Wouldn't we do better to design systems that help people
> who don't know much about computers to solve their problems
> anyway?


I don't think it's a design issue in this case.  We have a problem where a
user was subscribed to a mailing list that he no longer wants to be a part
of or participate in.  How did this person get onto the list in the first
place? The only way I know of is to subscribe to the list via the
tfug.orgsite.  Either the user did this himself or managed to lose
control of his
email account (a more worrisome problem in and of itself) and had someone
else subscribe him to the list.  If the user subscribed himself, then he HAD
to have gone to the listinfo page and subscribe himself.  Thus, he can
easily UNsubscribe himself if he follows the same procedure that got him on
the list.  If someone had malicously subscribed him to the list, then he
should be able to track this person down and ask THEM to take him off of the
list.  There are times where we can blame the system, but ultimately (at
least in this case), the blame lies solely in the user.

He now found out (at least from last night's discussion) how to unsubscribe
himself.  Yet here he still stands!  We've given him the roadmap, now all he
has to do is follow the simple instructions.  Perhaps he's forgotten his
password?

For example, if someone sends 'please take me off your mailing list'
> type emails, a rudimentary heuristic scoring system should recognize
> them and send the person emails saying that to stay on the mailing list,
> the person will have to do something (send back a specific type of reply?
> check a web form? something like that) or the person will be removed.
>
> There are millions of people with better things to do than to
> learn to really understand computers.


<snip>

I do almost admire the resourcefulness some users show in
> getting themselves into problems that they don't understand.
> Not that any of *us* have ever been there. ;-)


It wouldn't be a bad idea - perhaps some sort of automatic reply wouldn't be
a bad idea.  And I do agree about the ability of users to thouroughly bork a
system....There isn't a day (in support) that goes by when I'm not amazed by
something incredibly odd that a user has managed to do to a machine.

-Chris