Here it is, the first day of April, 1995, according to the clocks here in
Salt Lake City. Those of you who have been involved with the British car
and autocross lists will no doubt remember years past, where the occasion of
April Fool's Day has meant some strangely believable message coming from my
keyboard. Those many of you who are newcomers to the various lists will
have to bear with me, if you please. Some of what I talk about will not
make much sense to those who've only recently subscribed.
First off, I would like to thank you. All of you, each and every one.
Without the subscribers, the lists would be quite meaningless. But with
a community of folks out there sharing their interests, the mailing lists
become a worthwhile use of modern technology. Don't worry about the tone
of this message, I'll go into my usual list admin chastise mode in a moment.
But thanks again. I've not yet had time to send personal acknowledgemnts
to all those who contributed to my last round of begging, but your response
convinced me once again the work of running these lists is worthwhile.
Dale Cook, Our Fovnder, can probably relate.
And this is not an April Fool's joke. I do have some ideas for good ones,
but now you'll have to wait 364 days to find out. Several of the ones in
the past have involved a common scenario, wherein the Fat Chance Garage goes
commercial and becomes wildly successful. The going commercial part is coming
about, in real life, the wild success remains to be seen.
Now for the list admin stuff. Remember to check your replies, folks, so
that instead of sending your mail to majordomo or XXX-owner@autox.team.net
you actually send your list submissions to the proper place. And requests
to unsubscribe go to majordomo@autox.team.net. If you don't do it right,
you should get a help message, including examples of what not to do. And
some of you have figured this out, a few of you haven't - if you want to
change your address, or switch from digest mode to regular, or vice-versa
on the lists that support it, you unsubscribe from the one you don't want,
and subscribe to the one you do want:
unsubscribe ax-digest treadwear@cones.com
subscribe autox treadwear@newhost.cones.com
If you are trying to be helpful and tell others about these lists, either
privately or in a newsgroup or some such, tell them to send their mail to
majordomo@autox.team.net, don't tell them to subscribe by just sending some
mail to the whole list. Sure, it may take me only a minute to deal with a
misdirected message, so you don't think your message will make much of an
impact on me. If everyone thought that, and there are about 2,000 people
affected by the lists I take care of, consider what 2,000 minutes of my
time amounts to. But if majordomo just can't deal with your request, do
send it me. Just don't get the wrong impression if my reply takes a few
days and is only a curt half sentence.
For the last bit of list administration stuff, I'll ask folks to try and
use ftp.team.net for ftp access, and www.team.net for Web access. In the
next month of two, the service that triumph, the machine on my desk, provides
may move to a differnet platform, on the outside of our firewall. This should
help with the folks who have trouble, getting a connection that just hangs.
More details on that as it occurs, but if you use the generic names, any
shuffles on my end will be unnoticed on your end. Fat Chance!
So please, try to follow the rules as they apply, making it easier on all of
us to provide the resource these lists have become.
And thanks again.
mjb.
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