Preston,
I'll briefly reply to response to try to make clear the the overall
problem, which you don't want to acknowledge...
The plain fact is that you are running a commercial site, which is
apparent to anyone who has visited Backup Central and seen the banner
and sidebar sponsored links, including the one offering "Place your ad
in this space: Backup Central can help you reach 1000s of new
customers". And your site links itself to non-commercial mailing
lists, such as ADSM-L - but in such a way that when a posting of any
kind is made in a forum on your site, it gets distributed to the many
hundreds of people on the unsuspecting mailing list proper. Your
response to the issue is not that clear, but apparently you are now
saying that the message that you sent to some 1600 ADSM-L members
about proper posting behavior was intended only for your site's users,
but that in the absence of an administrative communication vehicle in
the design of your site, it went out beyond your site to the full
external mailing list. Worse, it was poorly formulated, with no
addressing preamble such as "To Backup Central participants using the
TSM forum:". Without any audience distinction, the 1600 recipients on
ADSM-L were left to believe that the missive was addressed at their
manner of participation in ADSM-L. And, of course, the great irony is
that your June 2nd message addressing the inclusion of proper
contextual information so as to make messages clear was itself without
context.
You're obviously busy, but it's simply irresponsible to cross-link
from your site to large population user groups without attentive
administration. You seem to be the only one actually running Backup
Central, and you are sometimes away from it for weeks, as you say.
That combination just doesn't work. The magnitude of the problem
resulting from the site design deficiencies and lack of attention is
certainly evidence of that. It would have been nice if you had taken
the magnanimous step of apologizing to the membership of ADSM-L for
the mis-communication; but instead your choice was to blame an
individual messenger.
I would strongly advise that you sever the link between your site and
external mailing lists at least until the manifest problem of intra-
site communication can be fixed within Backup Central, so as to avoid
incidents as occurred at the beginning of this month. It is also
problematic for Backup Central to be pipelined to external forums if
Backup Central is essentially running unattended, with no one to
perceive or respond to problems.
What I'm asking is that you respect the right that ADSM-L members have
to pursue matters within the realm of the mailing list they joined,
without intrusion and disruption from external sources.
Richard Sims
