At 5:19 PM -0400 7/28/00, David W. Tamkin is rumored to have typed:
| (I love questions like, "If I do <this>, what will happen?" I want to | shout, "TRY IT, FOR PETE'S SAKE!") <snip> You don't try to iden- tify an unknown substance by tasting it, nor by feeding it to your family.
(*sigh*) It's a computer program, not a foodstuff. If you set up a testing, non-production list, you can then test recipies to your heart's content. This isn't a mushroom found in the wild, it's a piece of open-source software, where the user may freely access and alter _every piece_ of the code. When someone asks that question, they are simply too lazy to learn the software by experimentation, which is the _only_ way to really understand any software, but especially open-source, which _demands_ the courage to accept the learning curve. Instead of asking that question, the user should have tried it, and if it didn't produce the expected results ask the list _why,_ including the experiment's results. If, on the other hand, the person tests a new recipe on a production mailing list, I have no sympathy if it blows up in their face. But I _expect_ everyone using SmartList to at least attempt an understanding of it; I am weary of people acting like they purchased a $2k license to listserv and expecting the same "customer support." SmartList is cool, and you can do nifty things with it - pretty much anything you can imagine, if you have the courage to learn procmail and experiment. (Example: I didn't like the way the digests looked, so I rewrote digest using list conditionals...each digest list may look different. Tough? Nope, only took a minute and the slightest knowledge of shell scripting. But effective, and kinda cool.)
Charlie posed in passing,
| (Where does it say we _need_ to have every clueless newbie on our lists? <snip> Oh, I feel it deserves an answer.
Maybe, and your answer is pretty much what mine would be (almost to the level of scarcasm, although I might be grumpier on a good day). However, an equal argument could be made by the other side, I suppose, and since it has nothing to do with supporting the list management software I should never have even posed the question in this forum. (It's certainly on-topic in other forums, though.) Charlie