I've been handling moderation of all the NativeNet mailing lists for
the past couple of weeks, pending the return of Jay Brummett who had
to take off suddenly (for reasons I'll let him tell you when he's back)
and the recruitment and installation of some additional alternate mod-
erators. Though I have been handling the smaller-volume lists (NAT-EDU,
NAT-LANG, and NAT-HLTH) for some time, it's been nearly a year since I
have done much moderating of NATIVE-L or NATCHAT, so I had lost touch
with some of what goes on on those lists in the way of being aware of
all that can (and does) go wrong. On the basis of this experience, I'd
like to offer a few words to let those of you who are considering sub-
mitting an article something to think about before you do so, in hopes
that it will lead to a better experience for you (and for the moderator).
I hope that you will all save a copy of this article for the time when
you do want to post something.
1. Use meaningful subject lines.
When you post an article on some subject, please be sure that there
is a subject line included on the message containing your article.
(In fact, I am about to modify the software that intercepts incoming
articles so that any article not containing a subject line will be
returned to the sender, since the article cannot be processed without
such a line.) Make sure that the subject line properly describes the
content of your article: don't use just one or two words to tell your
readers what the article is about - make the title long enough so
someone receiving the article can make a decision about whether or
not to read the article based on the title of the article which most
contemporary mail systems make available on an index page. Also try
to keep in mind that (except in the case of the NATCHAT list), a copy
of your article will be retained in online archives and people may be
searching for information on some subject you may have written about
several years from the time you submit the article. Try to make the
job of those people as easy as possible. The NativeNet moderators
can and will edit subject lines if they feel they are not descriptive
enough - but it's a lot easier for article authors to write proper
subject lines in the first place.
2. Keep article line lengths shorter than eighty (80) characters.
Please remember that even if you are using a workstation that lets
you create terminal windows of any size you like, many (most) folks
still have screens with old-fashioned punched card-based widths of
eighty (80) characters, and size your terminal window accordingly
before composing an article to post on a mailing list (the same
thing goes for sending an ordinary mail message to one of your
electronic correspondents, by the way). Again, I am contemplating
modifying my mail-interception software to automatically reformat
articles which contain a number of lines longer than 80 characters,
just to save the moderators having to deal with the situation.
Such an automated solution may end up scrambling at least some
portion of your article, so it's best if you keep lines short
enough to avoid triggering this mechanism. :-)
3. Do not include complete copies of articles to which you are responding.
(N.B. users of the PINE mail system, especially!). It is generally
safe to assume that someone reading your article has already read
the article to which you're responding and that s/he recalls the
previous article well enough for you to make whatever point you want
to make without needing to tack a complete copy of that earlier
article onto yours. However, it is often a good idea to include a
few lines of text from the previous article just to remind readers
what the subject was about.
For example:
| Patricia Jacobson <wheelingcol@igc.apc.org> writes:
|
| > White Earth Update and Action Alert
| >
| > Please help organize a letter writing campaign on behalf of
| > folks on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota...
|
| I would point out that while the US Constitution's Bill of Rights does
| not apply to the actions of an Indian Tribal Government within its own
| Indian Country, the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, 26 USC ss 1301, et
| seq. does...
If you are responding in a point-by-point fashion to a previous article,
you can intersperse your comments between short segments of quoted
material from that article.
3. Be careful not to send multiple copies of your article to the list.
Some mail systems (PINE is especially notorious in this regard) ask
you whether you want to "Reply to all recipients," by which they are
attempting to determine whether you want a copy of your message to
be sent to everyone whose address appears in the header of a message
which you have received and to which you are now replying. If you
answer YES to this question in the case of a message containing an
article from one of the NativeNet mailing lists, two copies of the
message will be sent to the mailing list - for technical reasons I
won't bother to tell you just now (you wouldn't really care anyway).
I have just installed a new feature in my interception software that
will generate and send a message to anyone who sends more than one
copy of a given article to a given list or who sends the same article
to more than one list - which brings me to...
4. Post your article to the correct list.
Be sure that you post your article to the correct NativeNet list for
the subject matter contained in your article. Remember that NATIVE-L
is to be used *only* for informational items, including questions, and
NATCHAT is for general dialogue. The NAT-LANG list is to be used for
subjects pertaining to the languages of aboriginal peoples, NAT-EDU is
for educational issues (both of Native people and about the cultures
of such people), while NAT-HLTH is for health issues. The moderator of
a given mailing list may elect to transfer your posting to another list
if s/he feels that you have mis-addressed your message.
Speaking of which...
5. Be careful not to send personal messages to mailing lists.
Remember that the headers of messages containing NativeNet articles
are set such that replying to a given message will result in your
response message being sent to the mailing list address, *not to the
person who wrote the article to which you are responding*. If you
want to send a message to that person, you must copy the address you
will find in the "Original Sender:" line that begins each NativeNet
article and send your message to that address (meaning you will not
be able to use the "reply" feature of your mail system unless it
lets you manually alter the reply address (as does the ELM mailer
that I use)). The moderator will generally return obviously personal
messages to their authors with instructions similar to what I've given
here, but sometimes it's not entirely obvious what a given person
intends - so it's best to be very careful in this regard, especially
if your response contains sensitive or personal information (in which
case you might want to avoid using e-mail anyway, which is notoriously
insecure, for a variety of reasons).
Well, that's all I can think of right now. To get a copy of lots more
information which is likely to be helpful in making effective use of the
NativeNet lists, please send a message containing the text:
get nn-intro newsubs native-l
to the address "listserv@tamvm1.tamu.edu"
(that's the numeral "1" in "tamvm1" and the letter "l" in "native-l").
Please let me know if anything above isn't clear to you or you have any
further questions.
Gary
--
Gary S. Trujillo gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,cdp}!gnosys!gst