Managing expectations, of mailing lists

[tom petch <[e-mail]>]

Postorius is not a name that has any associations for me; vaguely classical, perhaps, not anything technical.

I recently wanted to amend my subscriptions to IETF lists, something I have done occasionally in my years of involvement. I went, naturally, to the Datatracker 'the day-to-day front-end to the IETF database for people who work on IETF standards'. I spent many hours over several days fishing around dead-ends, perhaps raising alarms by appearing to be a hacker.  Eventually, I abandoned all previous knowledge and adopted the role of a newbie, going to the 'primary public face of the IETF .. at www.ietf.org' and that led me to Postorius and to my subscriptions.  (Even then, I tripped up on the difference between 'Sign In', 'sign up' and 'Login' :-(.  My time might have been expended contributing to the work of the IETF via mailing lists, but not on this occasion.

I see a gap here, that the 'day-to-day front-end to the IETF database' should have a pointer, some link, directing a user to Postorius when that is where a user can do what he needs to do, as opposed to all the things that he can do via the Datatracker.  I see no such indication.

There is nothing wrong with the Datatracker as long as it is that that will do what I want to do; the problem comes when it is not.  Hopefully I will remember that this time for when next I want to manage a subscription.

Tom Petch