I've followed this "programmer vs. user" discussion for several days now, and somehow I can understand both sides:
DV is surely right if he claims that software should be as user-friendly as possible - after all, we're doing all this for the users. But should software silently catch even the greatest user mistakes, like a mis-configured popup blocker?
My two cents: not if this will cause an out-of-scale effort for the programmer (at least not with free software). But at any case, software must work with the default configuration of it's environment - for websites, this surely is a freshly installed IE7.
So I reset my IE7 to it's default settings and tested the repository on the DotNetNuke Directory page (as DV suggested in an earlier post). Result (with no additional popup blockers like Norton): the yellow information bar informed me that a popup was blocked, and I had to do 4 (well-explained) clicks to allow all popups from www.dotnetnuke.com and to open the first popup. Since this only has to be done once, I find it fully acceptable, even for unexperienced users.
But how to handle users who have disabled all popups forever, perhaps without realizing the consequences? Well, next month I will have to add a repository to a website for users with little computer knowledge, and having read DV's experience with his users, I think I will give my users some aid and explain them in detail how they have to configure their popup blocker to make the links work.
Surely not a 100% solution, but I think most users are willing to change some settings if they see the benefits and if you guide them through all steps.