Hi Marc and Other Correspondents
Let me start at the beginning of this thread. You asked for something that will notify you when a message has been read by a recipient.
This is a contentious issue and most people feel strongly about things that affect their privacy. As Bar moderators, William and I could have decided to remove it or, at least, warned you that you may not appreciate the response you get.
Instead, we assumed that you would welcome a discussion of the matter. We try to catch postings that are intemperate but there is a limit to how many postings we can remove and there are lots of grey areas.
Now you have put up a rather intemperate posting yourself and requested that you be unsubscribed. Therefore, you will not even find out what other Free Pinters think.
I agree that some people post up messages that we would all be better off without. But when we remove things, we are sometimes accused of censorship. So we aim to strike a balance. I think we achieved that aim in this instance.
The first reply you got was very useful and interesting. The second expressed an opinion, but a perfectly valid one. The third was also a comment about the effect on the recipient when they have to choose to acknowledge or not acknowledge an email. I get hundreds of emails a day and there are several reasons why I find such notification requests annoying. As Bar moderators, we would have been completely unjustified in removing any of the responses you got.
Regarding your more general point about what the Free Pint Bar is for and what it is not for, there are a lot of Free Pinters working in a vast range of industries. It's impossible to say what is a serious use of the Internet and what is not. But the queries we encourage are ones about good resources, tools, techniques, etc.
If we excluded postings about song lyrics, we wouldn't have received the long list of song lyric resources available on the Web. And we've had several articles about music in the Newsletter, so these postings supplement our existing material. The original posting about Latin was a request for Latin translation software. It prompted many interesting responses about translation and language in general.
It can't be helped that there were lots of uninteresting postings about people's specific translation needs, but we have tried to take steps to alleviate the problem. And we try to tackle any other problems as they arise, especially when Free Pinters take the time to let us know what they think.
I'm sorry you feel the need to unsubscribe. You suggest that many other Free Pinters will do the same. This is not our experience. We have had some unpleasant rants in the Bar and some subscribers have complained. This has prompted us to take action and, as a result, we don't appear to have had any cancellations from disgruntled users.
In fact, in August, we had 1250 new subscribers, most of whom were information professionals. The number of people unsubscribing was very small.
Regarding your posting about domain information, also a contentious issue, you got the information you required. But I don't see why people shouldn't express their opinion too. After all, this is a free service, based on good will. The respondents are not your paid researchers. And even a good, paid researcher would express an opinion when appropriate.
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