Re: migrations (was Re: To all who wish to unsubscribe)

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 8:14 PM, David G. Johnston <
david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 11:59 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca>
> wrote:
>
>> All I, at least, was trying to say was that there were some of us who
>> were entirely surprised, and I'm kind of amazed that a bunch of
>> database people didn't announce a planned migration weeks in advance.
>
>
> ​My read on all this is that lots of people stopped reading these lists a
> long time ago and simply filtered us into oblivion. With the change those
> filters are not working and since they don't really care about figuring out
> the right way to deal with something they haven't interacted with in ages
> just do the thing most convenient for them and hope it works. No amount of
> pre-warning would help those people - its not like our decision to change
> our mailing list technology made them suddenly decide the content of our
> lists or our product was no longer worth their attention. And those that
> want to be kept informed will likely just react to whatever the new reality
> is when it comes to be. The email saying why it happened simply mollifies
> them when they ask why such a reaction was necessary.
>
>
This matches our interpretation as well, and it also matches the responses
we got from a couple of personal questions to unsubscribers when we did the
initial migration of the pgadmin lists.

This is why Stephen specifically sent an email made sure to be the *first*
one delivered after the migration, to let people know what happend. Because
those people would not have seen the initial announcement no matter what we
did.

Unfortunately what happened is a lot of people apparently ignored the first
mail, and probably a couple of more, and only reacted once they saw there
were "enough" emails coming through their filters.

And yes, we definitely know that a nontrivial number of people did this
type of filtering because they simply couldn't figure out how to
unsubscribe using the old system.

> What would help the majority of readers is if a rule could be added that
> keys off of the word "unsubscribe" (and maybe some other key phrases) and
> dumps it into a non-public moderation queue where requests can be handled
> manually and prevented from reaching the list members.
>
>
This is already the case, but clearly this rule was a bit too restrictive
to avoid too many false positives.

One big drawback to it was that it didn't filter on the subject, only on
the body. This was rapidly fixed once the flood was started, but in some
ways that was already too late.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/>
Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/>