ADMIN: Update, warning and offer

There are a couple items I'd like to address...

1. Downtime last week
2. Status of archives
3. Encoded attachments
4. Quoting previous messages
5. Access to list via web

**1** Sorry about the down day last week. As you know, I've been working on
performance improvements for response time to this list. That entails occasionally kicking in my testing configuration (lately it's been on the weekends). When I bring it back to the normal configuration, there are about six steps I need to do. Last week I forgot one of those steps and it resulted in the messages being sent to only about 1 in 50 subscribers. Thus why some of you saw the traffic and most of you didn't. I'll try and keep a closer watch on the switches, though. Again, my apologies.

**2** As you know, the list archives are still not available via E-mail.
This is because of the change in servers done last month. I will be making them available again in the next week or so. In the meantime, you can see item #5 below for an alternate method (and probably more effective method) of accessing the archives.

**3** Someone asked why encoded attachments are filtered out in list
traffic. First of all, let me remind you that mailing lists are intended to be PLAIN TEXT exchanges. There is no place for HTML and weird character sets in mailing lists. I don't care if your mailer supports it, or if you are from Romania; mailing list traffic should ALWAYS be in plain text, with no other encodings. This is the standard, so please adhere to it. Second, in support of my first point, I would remind you to turn off HTML and Rich Text formatting of your mail messages. Virtually every mail program on the planet offers you the option to turn this off (mainly because it's annoying for 90% of the world). Currently ListGuru passes Rich Text and HTML messages, but it is on my "to do" list to filter these out completely. So start now and get rid of that crap when you post to this list. Third, encoded attachments are NEVER appropriate for mailing lists. You should never post a binary, an executable program, a ZIP file, a picture or image, a PDF file, a document, etc. These things take up huge amounts of bandwidth, and 99.9% of the subscribers don't want your attachment. If someone asks for an executable or a document, send it to them via PRIVATE MAIL! If you want to post something that you think others might like, post a message OFFERING to send it via private mail. Never post any kind of attachment to mailing list messages. I warn you right now that offending subscribers who do this will be summarily removed and banned from the list. There are very few things that will get you banned from the lists here, but this is one. I have zero tolerance for the people who send 2MB files to the list, which I then have to turn around and send out to 1,200 subscribers. ListGuru filters out 95% of the binary attachments which get sent to this list, but some do make it through. The best policy is to never send any.

**4** Almost as bad a posting an attachment is the careless quoting of
previous messages. Because of the nature of this list, it's fairly common for a message to be hundreds of lines long (perhaps containing a SQL script, etc). When you go to quote a message, PLEASE cut off the trailing text that's not relevant. We've been seeing quite an increase in 3-4 line replies being posted which quote a 200 line original message. Other than carelessness and lack of respect for others, there is no excuse for this behavior. You can edit every message you send to the list, so please DO SO. Most mailing lists *require* that you limit your quoted material to no more than 10 lines. We try to "require" as little as possible on this list, and expect that in return you folks will be good net.neighbors and act maturely. Part of that expectation is that you will not quote excessively. I would appreciate each of you taking the time to watch how much you quote when you reply to list messages. Believe me, everyone will appreciate having to wade through less and less junk.

**5** I am working on web access to the mailing lists carried at my site.
If you want to be in on the beta for this, please reply (privately) to this message and I'll send you the instructions for access. Note that the current facilities are pretty sparse, but you CAN do things like check on the traffic sent today, read today's digest, search the past archives and more. In return for access to the beta, I request that you provide some feedback to me on things that don't work, things that are needlessly complex, etc.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to Received on Tue Oct 24 2000 - 12:08:16 CDT