9.450 editorial grouches

Humanist (mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU)
Wed, 10 Jan 1996 22:15:32 -0500 (EST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 9, No. 450.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/

[1] From: Willard McCarty <mccarty@phoenix.princeton.edu> (35)
Subject: editorial grouches

Editing an electronic discussion group certainly has its pleasures. Among
those aspects that, shall we say, are less than pleasurable are the
stupidies of software for which one must apologize and those others that
cause great annoyance to the editor himself. (Ok, so I anthropomorphize.
Just you try to avoid it, and I'll wager that the results are either dull
or incomprehensible.)

The ListProcessor that runs Humanist remarkably almost never forces me into
apologies, but it does have quirks that get under my skin. Among these is
its utter inability to recognize members no matter what Internet address
they use to send messages. The problem is compounded by the fact that it
treats these polynomial individuals no differently from non-members who want
the benefit of the circulation without having to cope with the general mail.
What it does is to send the messages from both to me, flagging them as being
in error. I then have the choice of rejecting them out of hand, e-mailing
the senders with some remonstrance or exhortation, or manually fixing the
messages and then sending them out. Up to now I have made the third choice.
This evening, however, I received an unusually high proportion of these
messages and finally had enough. So I decided to let you know about the
problem, and take the opportunity of coming up with what might be called an
editorial policy.

Let me know if you think this is reasonable. Henceforth I will either repair
these messages or dump them, depending on how much I think they really need
to be circulated. Those that I do repair I will reply to individually to let
the sender know what I've done and to ask that he or she do something about
the discrepancy between the official address and the occasional one.

The above may seem unjustifiably arbitrary until you consider that repairing
the messages takes a considerable amount of time and that most of the
offending messages I suspect are mass-mailings by non-members. Alas, I don't
really have the time to check, nor do I have time to remonstrate with
each member or non-member who sends a message from an address the
ListProcessor does not know.

To give you some idea of what a rejected message looks like, I append one
before repair that have just sent out this evening. Keep in mind that
I am operating on these messages through telnet, i.e. under very primitive
conditions for the kind of editing required. I've cut out most of the
text so as not to burden you twice.

Your advice will, as always, be welcome.

WM

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 9, No. 449.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/

[1] From: listproc@lists.Princeton.EDU (154)
Subject: Error Condition Re: CFP: NLP+IA 96/ TAL+AI 96

[2] From: listproc@lists.Princeton.EDU (160)
Subject: Error Condition Re: CFP: Gaps and Bridges - New
Directions in Planning and Natural Language Generation

[3] From: listproc@lists.Princeton.EDU (84 )
Subject: Error Condition Re: HPSG96-2nd Call for papers

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 09:56:50 -0500
From: listproc@lists.Princeton.EDU
Subject: Error Condition Re: CFP: NLP+IA 96/ TAL+AI 96

Rejected message: sent to humanist@lists.Princeton.EDU by
moghrac@Umoncton.CA follows.
Reason for rejection: sender not subscribed.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CROSS POSTING / Affichage multiple
Excuses

SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT / Deuixieme diffusion

********************** CALL FOR PAPERS & EXHIBITS **************************
================Appel aux communications & expositions =====================

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS
.....

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 10:12:38 -0500
From: listproc@lists.Princeton.EDU
Subject: Error Condition Re: CFP: Gaps and Bridges - New Directions in Planning and Natural Language Generation

Rejected message: sent to humanist@lists.Princeton.EDU by
kris@is.aist-nara.ac.jp follows.
Reason for rejection: sender not subscribed.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CALL FOR PAPERS

ECAI-96 Workshop
.....

--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 12:18:20 -0500
From: listproc@lists.Princeton.EDU
Subject: Error Condition Re: HPSG96-2nd Call for papers

Rejected message: sent to humanist@lists.Princeton.EDU by
Daniele.Godard@linguist.jussieu.fr follows.
Reason for rejection: sender not subscribed.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please post.

2nd CALL FOR PAPERS

3RD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HPSG
......