Regist-L

An Electronic Discussion List for College and University Registrars

 


A Brief History

Addresses You Need to Know

Subscribing and Unsubscribing

What to do if you are not getting Regist-L mail

The Regist-L Staff

Mail Options (like postponing your mail)

Mail Archive

Handling Mail Volume

Contacting the Staff

Regist-L and Advertising    

Netiquette


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.

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Addresses You Need to Know

Posting address for the Regist-L list:   regist-l@mailbox.gsu.edu 

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.

The address below is the one to use to subscribe or unsubscribe or to view the archives of past messages.

List web address:    http://mailbox.gsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/regist-l

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.

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What to do if you are not getting mail from Regist-L

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.

The Regist-L Staff

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.

irechg@langate.gsu.edu - Charles

bscranton@antioch-college.edu - Bonnie

jldavis2@uno.edu - Janet

mailto:snicholas@gsu.eduSteve

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Mail Options

Once you have a subscription (see above for instructions regarding subscriptions) MailMan gives you several mail options, which are set by going to the user options web page http://mailbox.gsu.edu/mailman/options/regist-l

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.

Mail Archive

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). 

Handling Mail Volume

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: 

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Regist-L and Advertising

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.

Netiquette

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.

Closing Comments

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 

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Copyright © 1995-2004:  Paul Aucoin.

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