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lederhosenMy journal entries come off sounding awfully negative, I've noticed. It's not that my life sucks - it doesn't, by any means. But when it's all going well, I usually just sit back and enjoy it and don't write about it. When I write journal stuff (in this or my other journal) it's normally because I'm venting. So only the negatives get recorded, and I come across sounding like a grouch.
I promise, my very next entry will be something upbeat and cheerful. But just one more...
I run a mailing list for the benefit of post-grad students at UNSW. (Well, two lists, but the second one is small and used only by clueful people, so I hardly notice it.) At any one time there are somewhere between four and five hundred people subscribed to this list. Most of these people are UNSW post-grad students. Theoretically, this means that they have completed high school, done well enough to get into university, shown enough intelligence and stability to complete a bachelor's degree or whatever, and have such a thirst for knowledge (or to augment their resume) that they're going back for more study. Theoretically, every single one of them should be bright enough to look at email messages and ask themselves questions like "Does this look like truth, or complete and utter bullshit?", "Is this something the other five hundred people on this list are likely to appreciate receiving in their inbox?" and "Does the Subject line of this message have anything to do with its content?"
Oh, and reading FAQs.
And ninety-nine percent of them do exactly that. After a campaign of education on my part, and rewriting the FAQ until it covered all these points in just over 200 lines, they use the list intelligently and considerately. They do not send images to the list (we still have several people using elm on their 286es to read their mail), they don't spread hoax virus warnings, they check suspicious-looking stories against those at the Urban Legends webpage , they post jokes in moderation and flagged in the Subject line so those who don't want to read them or might be offended by subject material can delete without reading. Occasionally they even post material that's actually about post-grad issues and activities.
But the other one percent...
After changing the list config options, I sent a mail to the list to announce that from now on every message posted would include a footer with information explaining how to unsubscribe from the mailing list. This announcement itself had such a footer. One of the replies was from Student W, who quoted my entire message without snipping and asked me how he could unsubscribe from the list.
Student X, after being told repeatedly that this was not a list for binaries, sent a large image through anyway. When I politely explained the inconvenience he was causing to users with older/slower connections, he suggested - apparently quite seriously - that students using machines below Pentium II, or mailers that don't accept attachments, should be *banned* from the mailing list. (So, tell me who's paying for all these people to upgrade their systems?) And used an 'anonymous' Hotmail account to send me a few abusive messages, threatening to have his 'rugby player friends' beat me up.
Student Y is basically a nice guy, and once in a while contributes something of genuine value to the list, and sends me nice emails once in a while telling me what a good job I'm doing. So I won't be too harsh about him. But about once a month, he posts a long rambling request for information on some esoteric subject to do with McAfee virus scanning software support, trying to fill a void that Norton's support staff are unable or unwilling to. He's been asking for about a year now, and I've never seen an answer, but he never seems to give up. When not doing this, he instead posts long rambling messages from the perspective of a wombat. No, really. At least his stuff isn't offensive or really inconvenient to anybody - he's a peaceful soul who believes in universal love etc - but it doesn't help the signal-to-noise ratio any.
Student Z joined the mailing list at the beginning of this year. In mid-March he posted an old urban legend to the list, and was annoyed to be told it wasn't true. In late March he posted an old, tired joke (punchline: "you don't have to be a brain to be the boss, just an asshole".) Unflagged, of course.
On April 1st, I "forwarded" an announcement from a "Mrs Avril Fuller" announcing that all student enrolment data had been lost, and that people would have to queue up to be assigned new student numbers and provide evidence that they'd paid their enrolment fees. About four hundred and ninety-nine people spotted this for an April Fool's joke (though not without some thought - we had a few hiccups with a new enrolment system this year.) Student Z was taken in, and when he realised he'd been had he started ranting about the evils of people abusing the UNSW mail service to spread such material. He also reported this gross abuse to our IT crew, apparently in an attempt to get me into hot water. Fortunately, their manager had a sense of humour and enjoyed the joke.
Next, Student Z attempted to send an image to the list. The filters caught it, and I told him off and pointed him, once again, towards the FAQ.
Next, he sent another collection of rather lame jokes to the list. Not a major sin in itself (lots of other people do that) except that a week later he sent the same lame jokes to the list again, even though he acknowledged in his own message that he'd already shared them with us. Maybe he hoped someone would laugh the second time around? I don't know.
Next, in late April, Student Z got involved in a heated political argument on the list. (Fair enough, legitimate use of the list.) He ranted about the evils of student unionism, and being expected to pay for things like child-care facilities that he didn't use. I pointed out that his annoying habit of quoting entire messages to add one-line comments and expecting other students to pay the costs of distributing 500 copies of these unnecessarily long emails was just as selfish as the people he was ranting about.
He responded by telling me that he had no idea over-quoting was rude. He also told me that on other mailing lists, admins rejected posts with too much quoting, so I wasn't doing my job properly if I'd let these through. (Shiny prizes to anybody who can explain how one sane person can try both these defences at the same time. BTW, despite my repeated explanations, he never did accept that the UNSW list was unmoderated, or that there were good reasons for this.)
Then he somehow managed to confuse his mailer with some sort of chat program, and sending messages with lines like "+noplay" (plus several pages of quoted material, natch) to the entire list. (I'm being charitable and accepting his later explanation here; at the time, I assumed it was deliberate spam, but it's possible that he really was clueless enough to have done this by mistake.) Either way, I decided enough was enough and kicked him off the list.
He responded by threatening legal action against UNSW and myself if not reinstated to the list with a public apology from myself, and some vaguely menacing but ambiguous material suggesting that I might have a stalker on my hands. Realising that I was dealing with a loony, I told him that I no longer wanted him to contact me in any way, and that I'd consider any such contact harassment.
So, he responded with "if I am not returned to the list and I don't receive an apology I guarantee you there will be further trouble. Take this as anyway you like (physical, emotional, financial, spiritual, psychological, legal)".
So, I got UNSW to nuke his account. Not long after, I received more mail from him at a new account with OneNet...
Two things I have since learnt about OneNet.
(1) Apparently, they don't believe in acknowledging complaints sent to their abuse address. At least, not within a week.
(2) Their phone support line involves a 30-minute wait, during which one is subjected to a tinny "Best of Enya" recording - interrupted at frequent intervals by a human-sounding recorded message, just to make it harder to tune out.
UNSW IT Person V (sorry, ran out of alphabet, going backwards) managed to configure the mail server so that any attempt to send admin traffic to my account resulted in a spurious bounce message - even though said traffic got through. Incidentally, these bounce messages were themselves admin traffic. Can we say "infinite loop", boys and girls? Thus nuking my mail account for several days.
UNSW IT Person U promptly 'fixed' the above problem for me. Several weeks later, I discovered that they'd done this by rerouting *all* admin traffic to dev.null.
UNSW IT Person T actually *fixed* the above problem, without returning me to the previous problem. I mention this only to demonstrate that at least one of them has a clue.
UNSW IT Person S set up an alias system, so that Joe Bloggs with a student email account of z1234567@student.unsw.edu.au (based on student number) can receive mail sent through joe.bloggs@student.unsw.edu.au. On its own, a good thing.
UNSW IT Person R managed to "improve" the system, so that mail sent to the original addresses no longer worked. The "fix" for this problem was for everybody to shift to their aliases. Eventually the problem was properly fixed, but by then most people had made the change to using their aliases, so most of the people on my list are subbed under their joe.bloggs addresses. Be patient, I'm going somewhere with this.
UNSW IT Person Q "improved" the system further, so that when someone's account dies/fills, a message sent to joe.bloggs will result in a bounce message identifying them only as z1234567 instead. This happens about once a week. I then get a bounce message for each and every mail sent to the post-grad list, until such time as I can figure out which of those 450-odd email addresses is secretly generating bounce messages. At the start of the year, 40 accounts did this at once. I was getting hundreds of bounce messages a day for weeks. In the end I had to mail EVERY joe.bloggs on the list, individually, to find out which ones were bouncing.
No doubt this list will go all the way back to A if I do this job long enough.
End of rant. Something cheerful next time, I promise! :-)
I promise, my very next entry will be something upbeat and cheerful. But just one more...
I run a mailing list for the benefit of post-grad students at UNSW. (Well, two lists, but the second one is small and used only by clueful people, so I hardly notice it.) At any one time there are somewhere between four and five hundred people subscribed to this list. Most of these people are UNSW post-grad students. Theoretically, this means that they have completed high school, done well enough to get into university, shown enough intelligence and stability to complete a bachelor's degree or whatever, and have such a thirst for knowledge (or to augment their resume) that they're going back for more study. Theoretically, every single one of them should be bright enough to look at email messages and ask themselves questions like "Does this look like truth, or complete and utter bullshit?", "Is this something the other five hundred people on this list are likely to appreciate receiving in their inbox?" and "Does the Subject line of this message have anything to do with its content?"
Oh, and reading FAQs.
And ninety-nine percent of them do exactly that. After a campaign of education on my part, and rewriting the FAQ until it covered all these points in just over 200 lines, they use the list intelligently and considerately. They do not send images to the list (we still have several people using elm on their 286es to read their mail), they don't spread hoax virus warnings, they check suspicious-looking stories against those at the Urban Legends webpage , they post jokes in moderation and flagged in the Subject line so those who don't want to read them or might be offended by subject material can delete without reading. Occasionally they even post material that's actually about post-grad issues and activities.
But the other one percent...
After changing the list config options, I sent a mail to the list to announce that from now on every message posted would include a footer with information explaining how to unsubscribe from the mailing list. This announcement itself had such a footer. One of the replies was from Student W, who quoted my entire message without snipping and asked me how he could unsubscribe from the list.
Student X, after being told repeatedly that this was not a list for binaries, sent a large image through anyway. When I politely explained the inconvenience he was causing to users with older/slower connections, he suggested - apparently quite seriously - that students using machines below Pentium II, or mailers that don't accept attachments, should be *banned* from the mailing list. (So, tell me who's paying for all these people to upgrade their systems?) And used an 'anonymous' Hotmail account to send me a few abusive messages, threatening to have his 'rugby player friends' beat me up.
Student Y is basically a nice guy, and once in a while contributes something of genuine value to the list, and sends me nice emails once in a while telling me what a good job I'm doing. So I won't be too harsh about him. But about once a month, he posts a long rambling request for information on some esoteric subject to do with McAfee virus scanning software support, trying to fill a void that Norton's support staff are unable or unwilling to. He's been asking for about a year now, and I've never seen an answer, but he never seems to give up. When not doing this, he instead posts long rambling messages from the perspective of a wombat. No, really. At least his stuff isn't offensive or really inconvenient to anybody - he's a peaceful soul who believes in universal love etc - but it doesn't help the signal-to-noise ratio any.
Student Z joined the mailing list at the beginning of this year. In mid-March he posted an old urban legend to the list, and was annoyed to be told it wasn't true. In late March he posted an old, tired joke (punchline: "you don't have to be a brain to be the boss, just an asshole".) Unflagged, of course.
On April 1st, I "forwarded" an announcement from a "Mrs Avril Fuller" announcing that all student enrolment data had been lost, and that people would have to queue up to be assigned new student numbers and provide evidence that they'd paid their enrolment fees. About four hundred and ninety-nine people spotted this for an April Fool's joke (though not without some thought - we had a few hiccups with a new enrolment system this year.) Student Z was taken in, and when he realised he'd been had he started ranting about the evils of people abusing the UNSW mail service to spread such material. He also reported this gross abuse to our IT crew, apparently in an attempt to get me into hot water. Fortunately, their manager had a sense of humour and enjoyed the joke.
Next, Student Z attempted to send an image to the list. The filters caught it, and I told him off and pointed him, once again, towards the FAQ.
Next, he sent another collection of rather lame jokes to the list. Not a major sin in itself (lots of other people do that) except that a week later he sent the same lame jokes to the list again, even though he acknowledged in his own message that he'd already shared them with us. Maybe he hoped someone would laugh the second time around? I don't know.
Next, in late April, Student Z got involved in a heated political argument on the list. (Fair enough, legitimate use of the list.) He ranted about the evils of student unionism, and being expected to pay for things like child-care facilities that he didn't use. I pointed out that his annoying habit of quoting entire messages to add one-line comments and expecting other students to pay the costs of distributing 500 copies of these unnecessarily long emails was just as selfish as the people he was ranting about.
He responded by telling me that he had no idea over-quoting was rude. He also told me that on other mailing lists, admins rejected posts with too much quoting, so I wasn't doing my job properly if I'd let these through. (Shiny prizes to anybody who can explain how one sane person can try both these defences at the same time. BTW, despite my repeated explanations, he never did accept that the UNSW list was unmoderated, or that there were good reasons for this.)
Then he somehow managed to confuse his mailer with some sort of chat program, and sending messages with lines like "+noplay
He responded by threatening legal action against UNSW and myself if not reinstated to the list with a public apology from myself, and some vaguely menacing but ambiguous material suggesting that I might have a stalker on my hands. Realising that I was dealing with a loony, I told him that I no longer wanted him to contact me in any way, and that I'd consider any such contact harassment.
So, he responded with "if I am not returned to the list and I don't receive an apology I guarantee you there will be further trouble. Take this as anyway you like (physical, emotional, financial, spiritual, psychological, legal)".
So, I got UNSW to nuke his account. Not long after, I received more mail from him at a new account with OneNet...
Two things I have since learnt about OneNet.
(1) Apparently, they don't believe in acknowledging complaints sent to their abuse address. At least, not within a week.
(2) Their phone support line involves a 30-minute wait, during which one is subjected to a tinny "Best of Enya" recording - interrupted at frequent intervals by a human-sounding recorded message, just to make it harder to tune out.
UNSW IT Person V (sorry, ran out of alphabet, going backwards) managed to configure the mail server so that any attempt to send admin traffic to my account resulted in a spurious bounce message - even though said traffic got through. Incidentally, these bounce messages were themselves admin traffic. Can we say "infinite loop", boys and girls? Thus nuking my mail account for several days.
UNSW IT Person U promptly 'fixed' the above problem for me. Several weeks later, I discovered that they'd done this by rerouting *all* admin traffic to dev.null.
UNSW IT Person T actually *fixed* the above problem, without returning me to the previous problem. I mention this only to demonstrate that at least one of them has a clue.
UNSW IT Person S set up an alias system, so that Joe Bloggs with a student email account of z1234567@student.unsw.edu.au (based on student number) can receive mail sent through joe.bloggs@student.unsw.edu.au. On its own, a good thing.
UNSW IT Person R managed to "improve" the system, so that mail sent to the original addresses no longer worked. The "fix" for this problem was for everybody to shift to their aliases. Eventually the problem was properly fixed, but by then most people had made the change to using their aliases, so most of the people on my list are subbed under their joe.bloggs addresses. Be patient, I'm going somewhere with this.
UNSW IT Person Q "improved" the system further, so that when someone's account dies/fills, a message sent to joe.bloggs will result in a bounce message identifying them only as z1234567 instead. This happens about once a week. I then get a bounce message for each and every mail sent to the post-grad list, until such time as I can figure out which of those 450-odd email addresses is secretly generating bounce messages. At the start of the year, 40 accounts did this at once. I was getting hundreds of bounce messages a day for weeks. In the end I had to mail EVERY joe.bloggs on the list, individually, to find out which ones were bouncing.
No doubt this list will go all the way back to A if I do this job long enough.
End of rant. Something cheerful next time, I promise! :-)
