From: Steve Marak samarak at arachne.uark.edu> on 2000.12.07 at 16:31:28(5766)
Aroiders,
Several days ago the administrators at MoBot changed some of Aroid-L's
list options, in an attempt to help with the "blank messages" problem
which has plagued us for so long. So far I haven't noticed any (the mailer
I use on this account is subject to it), but it's probably too early to
say for certain everything is fixed.
One consequence of the change they made is that while Don and I still must
approve all messages for distribution, we no longer have a chance to edit
the posts before they are sent. This is good in one respect, because it
saves us a step in the approval process and therefore speeds things up.
But it means we must either approve or discard a message, with no chance
to clean anything up.
One place we used to use that ability was to remove attachments, or
duplicated HTML copies of messages that some people's mailers would
append, or sometimes excessive quotation of previous messages in the
chain, or when the list processor mistakenly thought a message had already
been sent and we had to alter the checksum to get one distributed. (We
didn't alter the actual message text without consultation with the
sender.) It was easier and faster for us to do this, since we had to
resend the message as part of the approval anyway, than to ask the poster
to do it and resend the message.
But since we can't do that now, this is a reminder to please not send
encoded attachments or HTML formatted messages, and to hold quotation of
previous messages to what's reasonable for clarity. Those of us who have
high-speed connectivity and mailers which automatically process or delete
attachments tend to forget that not everyone does.
Thanks,
Steve
|