{"id":33403,"date":"2005-11-09T09:57:57","date_gmt":"2005-11-09T09:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2005\/11\/09\/the-psychology-of-naming-your-internal-distribution-lists\/"},"modified":"2005-11-09T09:57:57","modified_gmt":"2005-11-09T09:57:57","slug":"the-psychology-of-naming-your-internal-distribution-lists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20051109-57\/?p=33403","title":{"rendered":"The psychology of naming your internal distribution lists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One problem that I&#8217;m sure everybody has run into is what I&#8217;m going to call the &#8220;comp.unix.wizards&#8221; problem. People who have a problem with unix are looking for someone who can help them, and given the choice between a general questions group and a wizard group, they&#8217;re obviously going to choose the wizards because that&#8217;s where the smart people are! Of course, this annoys the wizards who created the group for focusing on advanced unix topics.<\/p>\n<p> Here&#8217;s a trick I&#8217;ve seen used by more than one team: Give your non-technical distribution list the name &#8220;XYZ Technical Discussion&#8221;. Meanwhile, name your internal team communication distribution list something less attractive like &#8220;XYZ Infrastructure Committee&#8221;. Your &#8220;XYZ Technical Discussion&#8221; list will get the support questions, and people will feel like they&#8217;re getting a &#8220;more direct line&#8221; to the technical staff. In reality, of course, the technical staff read both the &#8220;XYZ Technical Discussion&#8221; and the &#8220;XYZ Infrastructure Committee&#8221; groups. This is just a trick for keeping external support questions separate from internal team communication. <\/p>\n<p> (Now, by revealing this trick, I risk ruining it.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One problem that I&#8217;m sure everybody has run into is what I&#8217;m going to call the &#8220;comp.unix.wizards&#8221; problem. People who have a problem with unix are looking for someone who can help them, and given the choice between a general questions group and a wizard group, they&#8217;re obviously going to choose the wizards because that&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-33403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>One problem that I&#8217;m sure everybody has run into is what I&#8217;m going to call the &#8220;comp.unix.wizards&#8221; problem. People who have a problem with unix are looking for someone who can help them, and given the choice between a general questions group and a wizard group, they&#8217;re obviously going to choose the wizards because that&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}