Bob Finn

ON THE LISTS

by Bob Finn

Since my last column, we’ve moved the nasw-x mailing lists over to snazzy new Mailman software, and we’ve also created a number of new discussion lists.

Mailman allows for a number of enhancements to the lists and makes it easier to manage one’s subscription compared to majordomo, our old software.

(As an aside, the American Heritage Dictionary defines “majordomo” as the head butler in the household of a great nobleman or a sovereign. As sovereign of the nasw-x mailing lists for the past seven years, I and all my subjects have suffered repeated annoyances with my butler’s inflexibility, his supercilious manner, and his picayune insistence on following protocol precisely to the letter. Off with his head, I say!)

With Mailman, instead of interacting via e-mail commands, we use a central, Web-based, interface at lists.nasw.org to manage all subscription details. At that site you may subscribe to any of the open lists, you may easily switch between receiving individual e-mails and a digest containing about a day’s worth of messages, and you may temporarily suspend your subscription or terminate it entirely. If you wish, you can even set an option that will send you an acknowledgment when you send a message to the list.

The digests look much nicer with Mailman than they did with majordomo, our old software. For one thing, each digest begins with a table of contents. In addition, we’ve solved the problem of the gobbledygook that often appeared in the digests when subscribers posted messages using fancy fonts or formatting.
And bouncing e-mails from legitimate subscribers will be much less of a problem than previously. Almost all mailing lists reject posts from non-subscribers as a way of preventing spam from appearing. The problem comes from the fact that many people have several equivalent e-mail addresses, any one of which might show up in the “From” line of their messages. Mailing- list software has no way of knowing that smith@podunk.edu is essentially the same address as smith@mail.podunk.edu, and will reject messages from the address that’s not subscribed.

Mailman will also reject such messages, but it gives me, as list administrator, a great new tool to make this much less annoying to subscribers. I’m able to approve a message that has been bounced, so the subscriber need not repost the message from his or her other e-mail address. In addition (and this is the really cool part), I can add the variant address to a “sender filter” so that the subscriber can post messages from either address.

If you subscribe to any of the mailing lists and you would like me to add your variant address or addresses to sender filters, just let me know what lists you’re subscribed to and what variant addresses you may be posting from.

New lists

We’ve added several new lists to our lineup, which for lo these seven years have included nasw-talk, nasw-pr, and nasw-freelance (for discussion); nasw-jobs (for employment ads); and nasw-announce (for official announcements).

Nasw-books is available for the discussion of book writing or publishing.

Nasw-teach covers all aspects of teaching science writing. With 144 subscribers already, it’s the most active of our new lists.

Off-topic discussions have always been a problem on the nasw-x mailing lists. Discussions often stray from a topic of relevance to science writing to current events or other matters with no direct relevance. While many subscribers enjoy these off-topic digressions, many others find them annoying and a waste of time.

NASW member Norman Bauman (freelance, New York) suggested creating the nasw-chat mailing list as a solution. When an off-topic discussion breaks out on one of the other groups, someone will usually suggest taking the discussion to nasw-chat. Subscribers have recently debated religion, science, and public policy; abortion; and the war in Iraq among other topics.

In addition to these lists, which are available to anyone in the world (except for nasw-jobs and nasw-announce, which are available only to NASW members), we have a number of other mailing lists used for the internal deliberations of various NASW committees. The NASW board, the education committee, the freelance committee, the insurance committee, the membership committee, the Web committee, and the workshop committee all have discussion lists of their own.

Subscription stats

Nasw-announce is the most heavily subscribed of the mailing lists, with 2,673 subscribers taken directly from the membership database. Note that this is not the same as the number of NASW members, since some members list more than one e-mail address, and others list none at all. If you’re not getting nasw-announce messages, it may be due to a typo in your e-mail address in the database. Write me or Diane (diane@nasw.org) if you’re not receiving nasw-announce.

Nasw-jobs is the next most popular, with 887 subscribers. Nasw-talk has 493, nasw-freelance has 444, nasw-pr has 253, nasw-teach has 144, nasw-chat has 52, and nasw-books has 43.

#

Bob Finn administers NASW’s Web site and e-mail lists at nasw.org. His e-mail address is cybrarian@nasw.org.