No more "free Linux CD" mails! (hopefully)
On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 11:10:59AM +0700, ery gunawan wrote:
> Can you Please send me Free debian Linux CD to the below mentioned
> address.
OK, ENOUGH!
I've just added <http://www.debian.org/CD/free-linux-cd> to the web pages,
whose sole purpose is to get a higher score on Google than the "free Linux
CD" mails on lists.debian.org. Basically, it says:
The Debian project does not send out free CDs. Please do not send mail to
the debian-cd mailing list about this.
Instead, either download the CD images yourself or buy them from one of
our CD vendors. Alternatively, search for a Linux User Group (LUG) in
your area, you may be able to get a free Linux CD at a LUG meeting.
I know this is an ugly thing to do, but it is one of very few things which
will actually help against these mails. Writing friendly replies to the
mails will not have any effect, because the *fact* that someone has written
such a mail is a direct proof that they have not read the archived replies
to earlier mails on lists.d.o.
A cleaner-looking solution would have been to add an FAQ entry about this,
but I do not trust these folks to be intelligent enough to actually look
for the "free Linux CD" part in the long FAQ page. Instead, they'll just
skip to the next Google result, which is, um... %-|
This page will probably have to be online for a couple of months before we
can observe any effect.
Cheers,
Richard
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