Membership Drop on HP4GU

[kkersey_austin]

First of all - hi everyone! This is my first post, though I've 
been lurking on HPfGU for a couple of months after finally 
getting the "family set" of books from my mom and reading them 
all in a week's time. For some reason I thought the fifth book 
was already out so it was quite a nasty shock when I finished GoF and 
found out not only was it not out yet, but that I might have to wait 
another year...

Anyway, regarding the drop in membership:

Members in "bouncing" status are not included in the membership count, 
and Yahoo has been making some changes in how it handles bounces. I 
was stuck in bounce limbo for awhile myself, but (thanks to help from 
Kelley and Penny) got reinstated. 

A "bounce" is an unsuccessful attempt to deliver an email message - 
e.g. if your mailbox is full, or your ISP has their email server down 
for maintenance (grrrr...) - used to be Yahoo would keep trying and 
would automatically bump you back to normal status after a while, at 
least under most circumstances. The new system asks the bounced member 
to reconfirm the email address, instead of just trying to send over 
and over to dead addresses. While they were changing over, it 
seems that neither method was in place, so I was probably not alone in 
getting stuck.

The HPfGU apparently does not automatically un-sub you if you bounce 
(some groups are set to do that) - in fact there are currently nearly 
a thousand members in bounced status. Moderators can see more info 
e.g. the dates that members bounced, and can reset (or delete) 
bouncing members.

I don't know if this accounts for the drop in membership, but I'll bet 
I wasn't the only one affected.

I learned about the changes by scanning through the "listhelp" list, 
BTW.

Karen, who will be going back to lurk mode now


--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "coriolan_cmc2001" <coriolan at w...> wrote:
> Just over a week ago, HP4GU listed about 4200 members. Now it's 
> dropped to below 4000.  Was there some policy stance proclaimed by 
> the moderators that prompted 200 plus folks to resign or protest? Is 
> some assiduous soul weeding out defunct e-mail addresses? Or is 
there 
> some other explanation at work?
> 
>   - CMC