Friends, members, countrymen, lend me your ears. I came to bury confusion, not to judge anyone... No, I'm not asking where that "quotation" came from (I'm sure most would know where it comes from). But I'm sure this should sum up the following admin's letter (which I and Alex send regularly to send greetings and present moderators' opinions on current list policies and poss):
Dear BrailleNote Users communyoung:For some of you, today is a historical day, while for others, it is just another weekday or a school day. For those who're affected by what happened a decade or so ago, we understand your feelings. Hope you're comforted whereever you are. But beyond our usual greetings, we'd like to say hi and welcome to our recent subscribers (we hope you'll have an awesome time on this list). To our old friends: it was a pleasure serving you as your admin for the past year, and we look forward to being your moderators and humbly serving you for years to come. First, we would like to address some forward messages from HumanWare technical support as it relates to forwarding HW's responses to this list: Although it is acceptable to post replies from HumanWare staff, it is not a good idea to forward all responses you get from Technical Support. We do know that some issues in 9.3 are critical, thus some members did (and possibly would) send number of emails to HW. However, given that all the replies we saw (from people who forwarded HW's response) are what we would call "withypical responses" - namely, responses such as "it will be considered for future release" or "it will be forwarded to developers" are standard replies that people get. So if you do send your email to HW and you get a response like this (or similar), we'd like to kindly suggest that you do not forward these to this list unless this is first time that a given reply statement was sent to you (we have a number of examples like that). Same goes with automated responses with a typical subject line of "case number" - again, we'd like to kindly advise that you keep that in your inbox. Secondly, we'd like to talk about so-called "inbox floods" - that is, one or more members sending multiple messages, each having same content as the one before. This is also compounded by responses it generates (for us, the responses it has generated). We do understand that some of us are new to email lists, thus may not know email mannerisms, so we usually don't moderate or ban these people so that they would learn manners by interacting with and seeing posts from others. What would warant a ban or temporary moderation is if "offlist diplomacy" fails - that is, if offlist discussion between admins and the individual doesn't work, then the individual will be warned offlist (in a nice way) before moderation flag is set. But there are cases when a member will be put in moderation right away (we haven't seen this happen yet, thankfully). Now back to our discussion of email floods: we'd like to address something which came up on other lists, but we're seeing this for the first time here: please let us do our best in our positions. That is, if you have a major complaint about a member (or a group of them) such as asking the member to stop sending same messages, it would be best if you can contact the moderators directly so we can have some offlist discussions (with the parties invloved, plus the mods). This even includes us (admins; if you have a complaint against any of us, please send your email to us so we can respond and have a talk offlist to find solutions together). That's all. If you have any questions about this letter or other list policies, please feel free to contact the admins at braillenote-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx and we'll try to respond quickly (if possible). Thank you and have a wonderful week (and be careful not to get sick in this weather).
Sincerely, Joseph Lee University of California, RiversideBrailleNote Users List Admin (along with Alex Hall, your other admin (who I consider much better than I am in terms of administration))
------------------------------- BNU: BrailleNote Users - a forum for users of BrailleNote family of products from Humanware. Website: www.braillenoteusers.info IMPORTANT: By default, replies will be sent to individuals. If you feel that your reply would be useful for others, please use "reply to all" feature in your email client. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send an email with the subject line of "unsubscribe" to braillenote-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx. You can also visit our list page at: www.freelists.org/list/braillenote From this page, you can unsubscribe, change email delivery settings and view list archives. If you have any comments or questions for list moderators, please send an email to braillenote-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx. Thanks.
