From: Your Moderator <Arpanet-BBoards-Request@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU>
To: Arpanet-BBoards
cc: Arpanet-BBoards-Request
Re: Administrivia
Reply-To: Arpanet-BBoards-Request@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU

Hi.  This is a special message from your Moderator (some of you
probably didn't know there was one).  There are a couple of things I
need to tell the membership of the list about.  Some of these are
things that subscribers already know, but I'd appreciate it if you'd
pass this along to new people when you tell them about the list.

A copy of this message can be found in the file "COMAIL;BBOARD NOTICE"
(the space is part of ITS filename syntax) on MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
(available via anonymous FTP for Internet sites).

1) Addresses.  A lot of people seem to be confused about which
   address to use for which kind of message.  Submissions go to
   Arpanet-BBoards@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU.  Administrative requests (bugs,
   list addition/deletion, etc) should go to
   Arpanet-BBoards-Request@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU.  There is a third address
   associated with the list which you might see in a few places
   (Arpanet-BBoards-Bugs), but this is not really for human
   consumption; it is used to route error messages from foreign
   mailers to a special mailbox, rather than sending them to the user
   who submitted the message.  If you get an error message from any
   mailer regarding an Arpanet-BBoards message you submitted that has
   been posted (has the "ReSent-From: Arpanet-BBoards-Request" header
   on it), it is an error; any such messages should be sent to the
   -Request address so that we can take appropriate action.

   PLEASE DO NOT CROSS UP THESE ADDRESSES!  The various addresses go
   to different mailboxes (and in some cases different machines).
   Submissions that are sent to the -Request address may or may not be
   thrown out, likewise, administrative requests that are sent to the
   submission address will probably be ignored.  This is due to the
   volume of mail received by both mailboxes (eg, in the last week the
   -Bugs mailbox got about half a megabyte of mail, most of it error
   reports from broken machines).  Lastly (and fairly obvious) if you
   send mail to me (or any moderator, past or future) personally
   rather than the -Request address, your mail is almost guaranteed to
   be ignored.

2) Redistributions.  You are quite welcome to redistribute
   Arpanet-BBoards, it takes some of the (considerable) load off of
   MC's mailer.  But please don't do it without sending a message to
   the -Request address first.  In particular, any non-MIT sites that
   are receiving Arpanet-BBoards from some MIT site other than MC,
   please contact the -Request address.  There are some problems with
   doing this that aren't obvious at first glance (in particular, the
   SMTP return paths tend to get trashed and the error messages go to
   the wrong places).

3) BITNET.  I have been getting a lot of subscription requests from
   BITNET users.  Up until about a month ago I was granting them.  I
   am not doing so anymore.  The people at WISCVM (the BITNET/Arpanet
   mail gateway) are drowning under the mail load (this is caused in
   part by some performance problems on the Arpanet, but those
   problems are not going to go away in the near future).  The people
   at WISCVM have asked us to find a BITNET site that is willing to
   act as a redistribution point.  Once we find such a site, all
   current BITNET subscribers will be moved to the list at that site,
   and new subscribers will be added there.  We need a volunteer.  If
   you are willing, please send mail to Arpanet-BBoards-Request.

4) Suitability.  The guidelines for postings are somewhat loose.  The
   ostensible purpose of the list is to distribute (a) emergency
   notices ("Southern California just slid into the Pacific, machines
   at ISI and UCSD will be down for a few days"), and (b) notices of
   "academic interest", such as seminar and symposium announcements.
   Advertisements and for-profit notices are not appropriate (the DoD
   would get upset, among other considerations).  A touchy borderline
   case is job offerings.  The practice has been to accept postings
   from universities (the research community) and the research
   oriented military installations (the people paying for our hardware)
   but to refuse postings from private companies.  The (shaky)
   rational behind this is that university and military job offerings
   are "research opportunities" as opposed to for-profit advertisements
   (ie, joining the army or a university is not the way to get rich).
   I freely admit that this is an arbitrary judgment call, so be it.

5) Confusion.  For some reason I get a lot of requests from people
   who think that Arpanet-BBoards is a clearinghouse of all available
   BBoards and mailing lists on the Arpanet.  I realize that
   subscribers know better.  Please be sure that if you tell other
   people about Arpanet-BBoards or write it up in a documentation file
   somewhere you make it clear what the list is and is not.  The
   List-of-Lists messages that come over the list occasionally are a
   service provided by Rich Zellich <ZELLICH@SRI-NIC.ARPA>;
   Arpanet-BBoards is not involved except as a distribution mechanism
   for Rich's notices.  Contact Rich for more details (and keep an eye
   on Arpanet-BBoards in case Rich starts drowning under the mail load
   and asks people to send the messages somewhere else!).

6) Archives.  No promises.  We do have copies of every message ever
   sent to the list but make no guarantees that they will be online or
   available at any particular time.  The current archive file, such
   as it is, can be found as "COMAIL;BBOARD ARCHIV" on MC.LCS.MIT.EDU.

Please address any comments or questions to Arpanet-BBoards-Request.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Arpanet-BBoards.
Thank you for reading this far.

--Rob Austein (on behalf of the MIT AI/LCS ITS preservation society)
