Some of you know well how the Team.Net mailing lists, web pages and
FTP archive work, others are new to the whole scene. So I'm finally
going to babble on a bit about how this list works.
First off, the FOT list is one of roughly one hundred or so I manage,
over about 9 or 10 different domains. Some of the lists see only
occasional messages now and again throughout the year, some see dozens
a day. If you are on, say triumphs or spridgets list, you know how
busy things can get. It all started back about 15 - 16 years ago,
with just two lists, autox and british-cars. Things have grown
since then.
The Team.Net services are all run from a few computers in my basement
hooked up to a DSL line connecting them to the world. I volunteer
the time and hardware to keep it all going, though some number of
years ago I started an annual fund drive to help cover my out of pocket
expenses and hardware maintainence and improvements. Gee, the 2005 round
of begging for bucks ought to be coming up soon. If you care to, take a
look at the 2004 fund drive message at http://www.team.net/spring_2004.txt
and you'll read more about how it all works.
As for this list, it started back in December of 1996, with Joe Alexander
providing the initial concept, John Lye assisting in the creation and
yours truly providing the mechanism to see it happen. And it has been
working fairly well for the most part. Unlike the other team.net lists,
this one is an invitation-only affair. The list itself is run using the
majordomo software package, so folks can use the majordomo@autox.team.net
address to unsubscribe themselves, or download monthly archives from the
past. They just can't subscribe to the list without approval. Currently
there are 245 subscribers, 16 of those being on the digest. This summer
I may switch this list from majordomo to mailman, another mailing list
management program. That may make it easier on you folks to handle some
of your basic subscription management. Or maybe switch to a web-based
forum arrangement instead of an email list. We shall see.
Basic list operation is fairly simple. Subscribers send mail to the
address fot@autox.team.net and it gets sent to the other members. Unless
for some reason the message gets held and requires manual intervention.
Some reasons for this are explained in http://www.team.net/posting.html
though this particular list is exempt from some of the filters. So
if you send in a message, and see it appear days later, you know it
probably was held up waiting for me to do something with it.
Majordomo does filter out attachments, converts HTML email to plain
text and such. If there are pictures or movie clips or whatever that
you want to share and you don't have a place to put them, let me know
and I can make them available somewhere for public access, perhaps in the
http://www.team.net/the-local web pages.
List content is for the most part supposed to be about the sporting
Triumphs, mostly relevant to various forms of competition as perusing
past mail would indicate. We tend to frown on off topic stuff, political
ramblings and such, though they do happen. I have tried to get folks
from the various marque lists to use the-local@autox.team.net as a place
for off topic, frivilous, political or just weird stuff, but nothing
much has come of it, it is a pretty quiet list. Check out
http://www.team.net/mailman/listinfo for some information on that list
and various other mailman managed lists.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, I sometimes actually
do get around to reading and responding to all my email!
Enough for now, back to my real job.
mjb.
|