In article <36DFD201.F3B90098@peak.edu.ee> , Margus Ramst 
<mar### [at] peakeduee>  wrote:

> I would argue that the majority of people already have 3.1 installed and
> don't need the full download. I certainly wouldn't want to get the whole
> 3.1e just to fix the bump_map problem. Perhaps you could make the
> executable-only version a more difficult to access, so people would get
> to it only when they really want it.
> BTW, were there many who bitched you about it? Just interested as to how
> commonplace stupidity is within our species...

I can't tell you about the other platform experiences, but for example on
the Mac we included a questionnaire application within the documentation
folder. We did not want the application to automatically e-mail the answers
(so users can be sure we don't access and infomration they don't want), so
we offer saving it to disk or putting it into the clipboard to paste it into
an e-mail. At the end of the questionnaire application this is explained in
detail:

"You can e-mail your answers to us at "pov### [at] compuservecom".
Press the Copy button to copy your answers to the clipboard. Then simply
paste them into your e-mail and put "Questionnaire" in the subject line.
If you do not want to send the e-mail now, press the Save button and your
answers will be written to a text file. Please copy the content of the text
file in the body of the e-mail when sending the e-mail.
Please remember to put "Questionnaire" in the subject line and please do not
send the text file as an attachment. We use automatic processing and
attachments cannot be processed."

And in the file the user will paste into the e-mail again the following
text:

"Please e-mail this file to "pov### [at] compuservecom"
and specify "Questionnaire" in the subject line.
Send it in the body of the e-mail. Please do not send
the text file as an attachment. We use automatic
processing and attachments cannot be processed.
Don't edit information in this file. Some numbers may
look strange but they contain the right information."


So we have clear and redundant information. We got about two per month who
somehow manage to ignore this. We got it as attachements, as compressed
attachments, we got the whole answers in the subject line (its about 2 KB of
text...) and some people manges to cut off parts etc, etc...

And now remember that there are many more Windows users out there, even if
there are only ten times as many I would guess that there would be at least
one of the complaints per day, maybe even more...

However, maybe giving it a try for a week or two and see how many there
really are might be possible (also I personally would not do that)   :-)


     Thorsten

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