Regist-L
A Brief History
Regist-L's progenitor, Registrar-L, was started in November of 1991 as a
small homemade mailing list on a machine at Cornell University by Paul
Aucoin with technical assistance from Mike
Shappe. It was the first such list attempted by
Cornell, and its creation was made possible by many folks and much
cooperation. The original membership was about 17 members and the idea was to
create a virtual community of registrars (of all levels) who shared their
common experiences through the Internet. It was intended to promote sharing of
information, experiences, concerns, and advice about issues affecting records
and registration professionals. Humanistic, technical, legal, financial, and
administrative viewpoints were (and still are) encouraged.
The list quickly grew from 17 charter members to over a 100 members in the
first year and caused us to move it to a real (almost) listserv on another
(bigger, more powerful) machine at Cornell. After another year (and over 300
members!) it was moved to a real listserv at Georgia State University where it
still lives.
Evelyn Buffington and Registrar Emeritus Jim Greene of GSU worked with
Paul and Mike to coordinate the transfer, and we
all owe Jim a real debt of gratitude for his shepherding of the project at GSU.
Jim, Bonnie Scranton of Antioch College in Ohio, and Janet
Busekist in Hammond,
Louisiana, share management of the list with Charles Gilbreath of GSU. Steve
Nicholas at GSU is the system manager. Paul is now
Listguy Emeritus. Charles manages the behind-the-scenes aspects
of the list.
In May of 1995, the list was moved to CREN
Listprocessor software at GSU, and entailed another address change for
the list. This latter move was ably coordinated by Keith Campbell of GSU. In
September of 2004, the venerable Lisproc software
was retired and replace with a web-based list management system called MailMan.
Charles and Steve oversaw this process.
Regist-L now has a current membership of about 1400 folks, some more
actively posting messages than others. Typical traffic on a weekday is from 30
to 40 messages, many of which are responses to pleas for help with a
particular problem one of us is encountering. Included in the 1400 or so
members are several international subscribers.
A message posted to this address will be seen by about 1400
registrar-types worldwide. Hence, this is not the appropriate address for
requesting changes in mail options or for help in setting your user options.
Nor should personal messages be posted here.
To subscribe to REGIST-L, provide your email address and your name in the
boxes provided. You can also select a password – but don’t select an
important one that you use for some other secure system, since the MailMan
system will send you a monthly reminder or your password in clear text. This
password is really just to make sure that you are the person setting your
personal list options. Once you submit your subscription request, the system
sends you a confirmation message. You must respond to this message in order
to activate your subscription. This is to prevent someone else from sending
in your email address and subscribing. One more word about the password – if
you can’t remember your password (or you never knew what it was, since the
system assigned passwords to everyone who was moved over from the
listproc subscription list), go to the Member
Oprions page
http://mailbox.gsu.edu/mailman/options/regist-l and enter your email
address. Toward the bottom of the page is a “Remind” button you can click
that will cause the system to send you an email message with your password.
To unsubscribe from REGIST-L, go to the web address above and scroll down
to the “Regist_L Subscribers” section, where you
will see a button for “Unsubscribe or User Options.” If you are changing
jobs, it would be best to signoff from the list and subscribe again when you
are in your new situation.
If your email address is changing, you can either use the “Unsubscribe or
User Options” button on the mail web page, or you can go directly to the
Member Options page at
http://mailbox.gsu.edu/mailman/options/regist-l where you will log in and
then be able to change your address.
First you should determine whether or not you are still subscribed. Go to
the “Member Options” page and enter your email address and your password (see
the password reminder button at the bottom of the page if you can’t remember
your password). If you can’t get in, that means you don’t have a subscription
and you should follow the subscription information listed above.
If you do get in, that means you do have a subscription, and there are
several things you can check. Is the “Mail Delivery” option enabled or
disabled?
If you are subscribed and you do have your email delivery enabled, then it
may be a setting that the list manager will have to investigate. If you have
had problems with your email system on your campus, the MailMan software may
have received a number of “fatal bounces,” or messages from the email system
that messages were returned as “unable to deliver.” After a series of these,
the MailMan system will keep your subscription, but it will flag it as
inactive. A manager will have to go into the subscription list and reactivate
you.
If you none of these is the problem, then it may a problem with
regist-l, or with something at your site or on the
way to it that you or your guru there must solve. The list managers will
take care of the problem, if something is wrong with the
regist-l list.
Paul Aucoin is the founder of the list and
Listguy Emeritus. Charles Gilbreath succeeded Paul
as active listowner in November 2001, on the
occasion of Regist-L's 10th anniversary. Charles runs
the list in consultation with Janet Busekist,
Bonnie Scranton and Steve Nicholas. Bonnie, Janet,
and Charles manage the REGIST-L List and are mainly responsible for adding
members who don't know how to set their user options and use other commands
they could learn for themselves by reading this documentation. ; - )
Steve Nicholas is the Regist-L Technical Advisor and MailMan Expert and
spends his free time helping people with more complicated mail problems and
chasing mailing list and network problems. We give him the hard stuff. Steve
and his colleagues make sure the software is operating properly, and help the
rest of us when we can't solve one of your problems.
Contacting the Staff
We all try to read as much of the mail as we can, but we can't catch
everything. If you have a problem please don't post to the list for help! Use
one of the addresses below. Please be patient, as we are all volunteers, and
have other jobs that have higher priorities.
Mail Delivery - Set to “disabled” and
you get no mail, good for vacations, meetings, and stuff—just remember to
enable it when you get back.
Digest Mode – Set this to enabled, and
you will get one email message that contains all of the previous day’s
traffic. If it has been a particularly busy day, the digest may fill and be
sent out before the normal digest delivery time of midnight.
Get MIME or Plain Text Digests – If you have an
email system that can handle MIME format files, you have the option of getting
plain text digests (one big message with all of the traffic enclosed, which
requires you to scroll through the message) or the MIME format. MIME digests
come as a single message with each of the submissions to the list enclosed as
an attachment. You can take a look at the subjects of the attachments and
open only the ones that interest you.
Receive your own posts
to the list? Ordinarily, you will
get a copy of every message you post to the list. If you don't want to receive
this copy, set this option to No.
Receive acknowledgement mail when you send
mail to the list?
What more explanation
does this one need?
Get password reminder
email for this list? Once a month,
you will get an email containing a password reminder. You can turn this off by
selecting No for this option. If you turn off password reminder, no
reminder email will be sent to you.
Conceal yourself from
subscriber list? When someone views
the list membership, your email address is normally shown (in an obscured
fashion to thwart spam harvesters). If you do not want your email address to
show up on this membership roster at all, select Yes
for this option.
What language do you
prefer? We (the administrators)
set this one for the list.
Which topic categories
would you like to subscribe to? We
haven’t set any topic categories, so the options that are concerned with
categories are moot.
Avoid duplicate copies of messages?
When you are listed explicitly in the
To:
or
Cc: headers of a list message, you
can opt to not receive another copy from the mailing list. Select
Yes to avoid receiving copies from the
mailing list; select No to receive copies. If the list has member
personalized messages enabled, and you elect to receive copies, every copy
will have a
X-Mailman-Copy: yes header added to
it.
One of the improvements made by the switch
to the new software is the increased ease by which the mail archive may be
reviewed. If you are a subscriber, you can go to the main page
http://mailbox.gsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/regist-l
where you will see that the first link is to the archive section. Each month,
all messages are bundled and neatly tucked into an archive file. You can
select sort the messages by date, by subject, by sender, or by thread (an
original message and all subsequent responses).
REGIST-L is a high-volume list. We routinely exceed 30 messages on busy
days. The mail options listed above help you deal with this volume. Here are
some tips on dealing with the mail in each of the message modes. Selecting the
DIGEST option is a popular method of handling mail volume. The advantage of
this mode is that the mail gets compiled into digests and sent to you just
once daily, normally around 12:00 midnight. If you have not selected digest
mode, you have no control over when the messages are sent to your account.
However, from there on, you can choose appropriate ways to deal with your
mail.
If you are on your computer all day and often receive work or other mail
that has to be checked more frequently than you want to check Regist-L mail,
it can get cumbersome separating the list mail from your other mail. If this
is the case with you, you may wish to look at ways in which you can filter out
the Regist-L mail into a separate folder. Ask someone at your node about Elm
filters or procmail (usually available on
Unix systems).
Other ways to handle this include simple self-discipline or a reordering
of priorities to make REGIST-L reading an important part of your work, which
is a common solution. : - )
MAIL DIGEST:
It might be tempting for vendors to want to post registrar-related
products and services they want to sell. This is not allowed. Georgia State
University does not allow commercial solicitations on the free lists that they
support for the higher education community. Advertising is not allowed and
will typically result in immediate removal from the list.
Vendors may listen on the list but
may not post directly to the list. Also,
anyone that posts a chain letter or get-rich-quick scheme to the list will be
IMMEDIATELY removed from the list. For more information,
see the posting by Jim Greene.
There are some things you should (and shouldn't) do in order to be a good
Regist-L citizen. A few suggestions follow:
Confirmation messages - Some mail
systems have a setting whereby you can get an automatic confirmation that your
message has been received if the recipient has appropriate software. DO NOT
use this option when posting messages to Regist-l. If you do not disable this
option, all 1400 of us will see each of the confirmations, because they will
go to the list. Habitual offenders will be dealt with in a manner that may
restrict their participation in our club.
Surveys - Please address
replys to surveys ONLY to the surveyor, who will
summarize the responses to the list. Asking a survey question implicitly binds
you to post the results of the survey.
Quotes - Quote
only significant parts of other messages when responding to them. You
should *never* post the other person's signature file in your response cause
it wastes bandwidth and all 1400 subscribers' time. Also, you can usually
delete large portions of the referenced message and still get your idea
across. But don't be too brief. Messages that say only
"#1. Yes" and "#2. No" will typically not be useful unless a part of
the referenced question is included before the answer.
Signatures - Left to their own
whims, mail systems will not always tell us who or where you are, so please be
sure and include a few lines at the bottom of your messages that tell us: Your
Name and Title Your e-mail address Your institution You can create a
.signature file to do this for you automatically. Remember to delete your
signature file from command messages you send to the
listproc.
Personal Mail - Keep it off the
list. Be sure to look at the "To:" line in your mail header before
transmitting a message. You really don't want all of us to know who you are
asking to lunch, etc.
Disclaimer - This
is an unmoderated list. The
listowners and Georgia State University do not accept liability for
anything you say that may later become part of a lawsuit.
Well, we hope this will give you a little head start at making sense of
the Regist-L Universe. There are a lot of great people out there, a lot of
mail to read, a lot to learn (and teach), and good times to be had. If you
need any help with the list or have any questions about
listproc, or mail, or life in general; please contact us at one of the
aforementioned human addresses and we'll be glad to help (or try
point you to someone who can). Don't
forget to save this FAQ in a handy spot so you can refer to it easily when you
need to send a command to the listproc. "Bookmarking"
this URL or adding it to your "Favorites" list is a good way to save it.
Shantih,
Charles, Steve, Bonnie, Janet, Jim, and
Paul
Copyright © 1995-2004: Paul
Aucoin.
This file may be copied on the
condition that the entire contents, including the header and this copyright
notice, remain intact.
