4.1037 Editors: Changes in Diary Distribution (1/27)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 14 Feb 91 22:39:18 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 1037. Thursday, 14 Feb 1991.
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 91 21:45:29 EST
From: Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear <EDITORS@BROWNVM>
Subject: Editors: Changes in the Diary Distribution
The journal material from the Israel has grown in size and frequency.
Entirely apart from the issue of the appropriateness of its content
for Humanist, it is now simply too much to send automatically to
every Humanist reader. Remember that Humanist is read with many
kinds of mail reading systems and in many different circumstances.
Some systems are still very cumbersome, making inspection and deletion
difficult, or have very low memory allocations; and some Humanists
must pay for both storage (of even unread mail) and mail privileges.
Beginning next week all material of this kind coming from the
Middle East (including the current series and any new series)
will be distributed directly from the Humanist fileserver using
the Listserv Automatic File Distribution (AFD) feature. Roughly: you
will _subscribe_ (once) to the "diary file" if you wish to receive this
material, and then each digest will be automatically sent to you as soon
as we store it on the fileserver. You will not have to request each
posting, but only subscribe, once, to the "diary file". (All material
of this kind will be combined in one digest file). This will actually
provide more timely delivery than the current system.
I will post specific instructions for subscribing on Monday (Feb 14).
The cutover to the new system will take place on Tuesday.
This change is necessitated entirely by practical considerations and
is not intended to preempt any debate over "what should be on Humanist".
Not to worry: there will be plenty opportunity for that.
-- Allen