The Strathspey Server
Your resource for Scottish country dance and music
The Strathspey Server
Your resource for Scottish country dance and music
The Strathspey mailing list is a forum for the discussion of all aspects of Scottish country dancing, e.g., dance descriptions, dancing technique, the history of dances and dancing, learning or teaching how to dance, ...
We also welcome descriptions of new dances, announcements of events like workshops or balls, or anything to do with Scottish dancing that the subscribers might find interesting.
The mailing list is unmoderated, i.e., everything that is submitted is forwarded directly to the subscribers of the list.
Please refrain from posting chain letters, »virus« warnings, commercial advertisements that have nothing to do with Scottish country dancing, and other non-topical material, important though they may seem.
(See here for the full informational brochure.)
Subscription and unsubscription requests are handled by an automated mechanism, which is explained more fully here.
Normally the Mailman software, which we use for running the list, offers a web interface that lets you subscribe to or unsubscribe from the list, and lets subscribers change the way their subscription works. Due to the way Mailman needs to be set up on the (shared) machine Strathspey is running out of, which is not something a normal person would want to think about over lunch (or any meal), this has never been made available properly for Strathspey (any announcements to the contrary, which Mailman insists on putting out, notwithstanding). We're trying to get rid of Mailman, anyway, so we're not exactly falling over ourselves getting this to work after all.
Please ignore all references to the web interface, and use the mail interface instead or ask the list managers (who are usually happy to make changes for you). In due course we will move over to our new homegrown mailing list software, which will be altogether easier to operate (as well as make the sun shine more brightly, birds sing more happily, etc. — we're not sure about lasting peace for the Middle East yet, though) and may eventually offer its own web interface.
At times there can be rather a lot of traffic on the Strathspey list, and your other e-mail can all but disappear in the deluge (depending on how much you get otherwise). There are basically two approaches you can take to handle this. The sophisticated thing to do is to obtain a mail program that can pre-sort your mail into different »in trays« (these days, most of the popular ones seem to be able to do this). That way, you can divert all the Strathspey mail off to one side to read it at leisure. It depends on the computer system you're using whether such a »filter« is available - please contact your local guru. The other possibility is to subscribe to the »digest« mailing list, see the question below dealing with this for details.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Tags like these clutter up the subject lines for everybody, and with the type of stupid mail program popular nowadays, messages will accumulate tags until they look like »Re: [STRATHSPEY] Re: Re: [STRATHSPEY] Foobar«. Please learn how to set up your e-mail program to put all the Strathspey mail into a separate folder; you can use the
List-Id: "SCD news and discussion" <strathspey.strathspey.org>
header which is part of every Strathspey message to recognise Strathspey mail. The feature in question is often called a »filter«.
(If your e-mail program can't do it, look around for a more up-to-date one — chances are that the one you're using is so antediluvian that you are missing out on many other convenient features, too. There are very good e-mail programs available for little or no money on all significant computing platforms today.)
The »digest« mailing list collects a number of individual Strathspey messages into a »digest«, which is sent out approximately once every day, or two days, in one single big e-mail message. This is convenient if you don't want your mailbox cluttered by lots of messages from Strathspey, but one drawback is that it is more difficult to reply to individual messages in a digest (although your e-mail software may help there). Another disadvantage, of course, is that you'll be getting most messages somewhat later than the subscribers to the »regular« list.
If you want to receive Strathspey as a digest, check the »help« message provided to you by the mail system when you subscribed. (You did hang on to that one, didn't you? If you didn't, send a message to strathspey-help@strathspey.org for another copy.)
If you don't want to receive messages from Strathspey for a while - e.g., because you're away on business or on holiday - the simplest thing to do is to set your subscription to »no mail« using the web interface. You can also unsubscribe by e-mail using the process outlined above and read up on what you missed using the Strathspey Archive.
Incidentally, if you're away without unsubscribing from the list and want to leave an »answering machine« program on your e-mail account that tells everybody when you're going to be back etc., please be sure that it won't try to send its canned reply to the Strathspey list for every Strathspey message it receives (or any mailing list, for that matter) - amazingly enough there are mail servers sold for good money which are stupid enough to try and do this! The list software is reasonably good at filtering these absence notices out, but it is still somewhat of a nuisance. In the worst case, it can lead to infinite e-mail loops (but fortunately this hasn't happened yet on Strathspey).
If you send a message to the list for distribution you should have a copy back very quickly (minutes, if things are very slow). If you don't get a copy until hours or even days later, even though you have received other mail in the meantime, chances are that your message had to be »moderated«.
The list is set up to refuse messages from addresses it can't find in its subscriber database. (This helps keep the list clean from unsolicited non-SCD advertising, among other things.) Such messages are sent to me (the list owner) for »approval«, meaning I check whether they are bona-fide Strathspey submissions and, if so, tell the list software to post them after all. However, even subtle differences in your »From:« address as compared to the one you used when you subscribed to the list (like »foo@bar.com« vs. »foo@baz.bar.com« or »foo@quux.bar.com«) can cause your submissions to be delayed for approval.
You can check what the list thinks your address is by looking at the »Return-Path« header that your mail program should make available to you (possibly with some prodding). This looks something like »strathspey-owner-foo=bar.com@strathspey.org« and means that this is a Strathspey message that the list sent to »foo@bar.com«. So your outgoing messages should have »From: foo@bar.com« for you to be able to post to the list with no delays.
Unfortunately, you can't - other than by reading people's submissions and browsing the archive. For one, I don't even have names for all the subscribers myself - some of the addresses in the distribution database don't give a clue, and others are just aliases for local distribution lists, where people want to save network bandwidth by getting just one copy of each message from our server and sub-distributing that to a number of local users.
Another important reason is that the names and addresses of the Strathspey readership could be considered privileged information under German data privacy laws. If I were to give out lists of names and addresses, I would at least need to give people an opportunity to object to being included on such a list. Since the mailing list software doesn't offer such a facility (yet), I would have to maintain the user list manually, and I simply don't have the time for that.
Yes - there is a section on the Strathspey Server which offers an archive of all postings to Strathspey (all but a few from the very beginning, that is). You can review the postings sorted according to various criteria as well as restrict retrieval to messages submitted during a particular period of time.
Most subscribers prefer Strathspey messages to consist of pure (ASCII) text. Some e-mail programs (notably Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express) are set up to send messages in HTML format, or as both HTML and ASCII. HTML-only postings will be refused, and messages containing both HTML and ASCII parts will have the HTML part stripped before they are sent out to subscribers. (Note from January 2005: With the move to Mailman, only »text/plain« messages are accepted. I will look at ways to get the old behaviour back when the web site has been moved over to the new server.)
The list is set up to refuse messages of more than 32 kilobytes in length. 32 kilobytes is about 15 pages of single-spaced typed text, so that shouldn't really cramp your style. Usually such messages arise when you try to send an attachment in a word-processing format such as that of Microsoft Word - but in general you shouldn't do that, since the list does not distribute such attachments anyway. Consider that not every list subscriber does have a copy of Word around (I, for one, don't), and that the same content can normally be expressed much more succinctly in an ASCII message. If you do want people to look at your beautiful flyer, then by all means put it on the World-Wide Web, although chances are it won't look just the way you wanted it on any computer except your own ...
