[Thinkpad] RE: Thinkpad list suboptimal

[Howard Price]

I confess that I was a little frustrated at the time of my initial post, as
it seemed that the potential of the mailing list wasn't expoitable due to
the lack of a search or tree function. I wasn't trying to be rude, but was
rather used to vendors being unresponsive with respect to improving their
products. The problem here was that I have been locked into using Outlook,
which doesn't tree emails. I have since tried Agent, which does inherently
tree them, and also allows searching.

I was a member of this mailing list back in 1994, when I had a TP755, and
most of the mailings were regarding the mwave sound circuit...


-----Original Message-----
From: elijah wright [mailto:elw at stderr.org] 
Sent: Saturday, September 18, 2004 4:27 PM
To: Howard Price
Cc: thinkpad at stderr.org
Subject: Re: Thinkpad list suboptimal




frankly i find your tone rude, confrontational, and a little bit juvenile.

if you want to make suggestions, fine, but do it in a constructive manner. 
asking for things that take five minutes to implement and are "invisible" 
to other listmembers will get done, and will be heartily appreciated. 
big stuff (in terms of time, money, effort, major software changes) or 
things that are likely to effect the list experience for others will 
likely not.

most of the list is likely to tell you to go straight to hades if you try 
to tell them that a bulletin board or a usenet newsgroup would be better. 
the membership of this list has been around for quite a long time, and 
generally has some notion of what works and doesn't *for them*.

if you don't like things on the list, at least be specific about things 
that are easily fixed and inexpensive in terms of my time.

cc'ing back to the list so that they can give additional feedback.  I hope 
you don't mind.

elijah


> Please tell me if I'm missing something regarding the Thinkpad list, 
> as I find the list almost unusable because:
> 1) There's no search function.
> 2) The postings aren't tree'd anyway
> 3) There's really no daily summary; perhaps because of the volume, 
> there's more than one a day. I switched to the individual email 
> format, hoping to use the titles to make them more like a tree, but 
> people seem to change the titles in their replies...
>
> I suppose the essence of this is that it's a mailing list rather than 
> a bulletin board. The list would certainly be more useful as a tree'd 
> bulletin board, rather than receiving 100 emails a day essentially 
> unconnected. Would it be better as a usenet group?