[Mailman-Users] Custom Sign-Up Form

[Lindsay Haisley]

Thus spake Brad Knowles on Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 06:11:28PM CDT
> At 8:03 PM +0200 10/16/06, Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:
> 
> >  Using this opportunity, has anyone thought of really making all these
> >  pages simpler, less jargon-free and more understandable for a typical,
> >  non-technical user?
> 
> That's a wonderful idea.  However, since most of the people who 
> contribute to these efforts are people who've been around for a while 
> and who understand the importance of things like reading the FAQs, 
> this is kind of a self-selecting community.
> 
> If you could provide some contributions in this area, that would be wonderful.

Anyone that does this kind of thing is a saint!  One of my big beefs with a 
whole lot of open source software is that it's written by, for and about geeks, 
and while the work would be potentially useful to a lot of people, it's 
surrounded by a haze of geek jargon that makes it semi-impervious to 
non-technical minds.  I run Mailman lists for the Travis County Democratic 
Party in Texas, numerous other political groups, and for a couple of musical 
instrument special insterest groups.  While the list admins for these are 
reasonably tech-savvy, the list subscribers are decidedly not.  I have to 
re-work stuff a lot.

For a project I'm working on I just de-geeked the Namazu search engine example 
page, which used Emacs, FreeBSD and other techie terms as search word examples.  
I replaced all the geek words with fruits and vegetables.  Everyone understands 
fruits and vegetables ;-)

-- 
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