We have a sudden influx of new users, so I’d just like to welcome everybody. Please don’t be shy to participate.
A quick reminder to read about the forum here:
This is a Discourse forum. Here’s a new user guide for Discourse:
The forum is divided into Categories. It’s not mandatory, but it’s good if you can post new topics in an appropriate category.
To clarify an important point, Discourse is a web based platform, but also supports a mailing list function as well in parallel. It is not a comprehensively featured mailing list such as LISTSERV (which is fiercely expensive). It does work reasonably well, and you can reply via email and also create topics via email. Email is a very complex thing on the internet and I cannot always guarantee mail will be delivered, due to services coming on and off spamhaus blacklists over which I have no control. We use Amazon Simple Email Services, with a supreme ‘reputation’ (technical term) but even Amazon SES gets on blacklists, and for example we cannot currently deliver to Apple based email accounts. So if you want to use email exclusively, I’d still recommend logging in here from time to time to check things.
This system is run entirely on open source software, but on commercial Linux servers, for which there are ongoing monthly costs. There are other costs as well such as annual domain name registration and so on. I’d like to ask people to consider making donations to help keep this site running. There is a link to the Donation page on the top banner of the web forum.
Now, as a matter of strict policy neither I not the moderators will ever edit the content of a post. I may from time to time reclassify the category of a post, and sometimes edit gross formatting errors, but there is no touching your content.
One thing worth knowing is that there is a deliberate delay of ten minutes after posting before your post gets mailed out, to give you time to edit the mistakes you always see after your press ‘submit’. And you can go back and edit your post at any time, including the title. Such edits do not send email updates, which is why the web platform is always the more authoritative source.
Finally, when quoting a post, please just trim it to the relevant part and don’t include entire posts in quotes - they are quite visible in the web page and duplication clogs things up.
Any questions about list usage or how to use the site, please send me (Admin user) a Personal Message, rather than posting a topic to the forum (you don’t want 200 users getting ‘how do I do …’ emails.
I look forward to lots of lively discussions. Don’t be a lurker, post!
Andrew Bernard [list admin]
Melbourne, Australia