TN-Birders: Freelists' ListRank is a means of determining the relative quality of a mailing list like TN-Birds Net. Freelist is the group which provides our list system for TN-Birds Net. It's a convenient way of ordering lists in search results and category listings with the added benefit of putting mailing lists that are obviously useless (abandoned, never used, etc.) at the bottom of those results. Several criteria are considered when building a list's ListRank, such as the percentage of subscribers who participate in discussions, the age of the list, etc. TN-Birds Net ranks fourth among all lists in the Freelist Science Category with a List Rank score of 68. It is among the highest rated of the 3,000+ lists hosted by FreeList. At this writing TN-Birds net has 514 suscribers. An amazing 61 percent of you contribute to the list. Collectively, you have posted 8,904 message to TN-Birds Net since it began on Freelist four years ago on Feb. 1, 2002. Our subscriber base has grown 20% since Apr 28, 2004. We are up 9.08 percent since April 2005. The constant flow of new subscribers coming to the list makes it increasingly important that we operate a fully-informative and friendly list with no insider messages, codes and abbreviations not recognized by everyone. Thanks to the hundreds of you who, time after time, for thousands of posts, work hard to include all the needed information in every post. You make this list the national example and leader in quality that it has become. We must always remember the vast amount of data gathered from TN-Birds Net by state, federal and local agencies as well as college and universities, museums and conservation agencies. Birders in Tennessee have been posting about bird observations in Tennessee since August 1995 when we began our first list -- formerly known as Valley Birds Net. Many of you were subscribed to that list and probably still have fond memories. You probably also well remember when the National Audubon Society in New York provided the computer servers for TN-Birds. We have long been among the first such state lists operated in the South. Since that time, our lists have posted more than 20,000 messages. Let's go birding..... Wallace Coffey Moderator TN-Birds Net Tennessee Ornithological Society Bristol, TN =================NOTES TO SUBSCRIBER===================== The TN-Bird Net requires you to sign your messages with first and last name, city (town) and state abbreviation. You are also required to list the count in which the birds you report were seen. The actual date of observation should appear in the first paragraph. _____________________________________________________________ To post to this mailing list, simply send email to: tn-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx _____________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, send email to: tn-bird-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field. ______________________________________________________________ TN-Bird Net is owned by the Tennessee Ornithological Society Neither the society(TOS) nor its moderator(s) endorse the views or opinions expressed by the members of this discussion group. Moderator: Wallace Coffey, Bristol, TN wallace@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx _____________________________________________________________ Visit the Tennessee Ornithological Society web site at http://www.tnbirds.org * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Topographical Maps located at http://topozone.com/find.asp _____________________________________________________________