Theos-Talk Archives (December 2006 Message tt00252)

I've received some emails inquiring about how the mailing list works,
and it seems that a clarification is needed.

For the last year or two, new subscribers have been initially
moderated. The welcome message tells them that they're welcome to
watch what is going on, and when they're ready to actively
participate, they should post a message about themselves to the list.
Then they'd be unmoderated. This is to make sure they understand how
the list works and to let everyone know who the new participant is.

The active participants on the list joined before that went into
effect or have introduced themselves, so they are unmoderated. This
includes Carlos, Daniel, Jake, Jerry, Ken, etc.

If you are unmoderated, your messages go out immediately, without
requiring approval. No one sees them nor has any opportunity to change
their content.

If anyone wants to see what they've posted, they can go to the Yahoo
website and look at the message archives. The archives there show what
went out on the list. It is at

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theos-talk/

It shows what has gone out, and its content cannot be edited. A more
complete archive is at

    http://theos-talk.com

This archive goes back years before the mailing list moved to Yahoo
and will continue to hold future archives even should the mailing list
every be moved from Yahoo to some other provider. This archive is
updated monthly.

When someone posts to the list, the only thing automatically removed
from messages are email attachments. This is an option of the mailing
list that is to protect against someone accidentally sending a file
with a virus to everyone. 

In certain circumstances, an message or reply is turned into an email
attachment by your email service, and because it is an attachment, it
will not go through the mailing list. An example situation is in using
Eudora with AOL. See

    www.expita.com/nomime.html 

Note again that if you are unmoderated, the only way anything would be
removed from your messages as they automatically go through the system
would be any part of you message that you sent as an attachment,
perhaps because of the way your email program or ISP's email service
processes your message. 

Regarding digests, Yahoo has its own process to bundle its messages
into digests. How this happens is beyond anyone's control. If you
think you have a message that did not properly get out, go to the
Yahoo archives (see the link above) and see what the original message
looks like before it went into the digest. This is how everyone will
see it that is subscribed under the "individual emails" option. This
will let you know how your message looked before going into a digest.

If you are new to the list and still moderated and if you want to
become active, post a message about yourself to the list and start
participating. We could use a greater diversity of posters and topics.
Over the past few months, the discussions have seemed a bit repetitive
and too much focused on the real or imagined shortcomings of list
participants rather than broader and more philosophical topics.