This is the list of frequently asked questions for UUS-L, the Unitarian Universalist discussion mailing list. Please save this message for future reference. You can find the latest version of the UUS-L FAQ on the Web at http://www.iecc.com/uus-l.
Mission
Addresses You Will Need
Unsubscribing and Subscribing
Changing Your Address
Changing How Messages Arrive (Digests)
List Etiquette (Please Read!)
The UUS-L Talking Stick
The UUS-L Mailing List Archive
Seeing Subscribers' Names
More Information
UUs-L is a global meeting place for Unitarian Universalists and anyone going our way. The list's intent is to provide a forum for sharing of UU-related information across district and regional boundaries; to bring into contact people and ideas who normally would never have met; and to foster discussion of functional and structural innovations we can make in our organizations and world.
UUS-L is not related, managed, or run by the Unitarian Universalist Association. Their Web site is at http://www.uua.org and their list of mailing lists is at http://www.uua.org/lists. The list managers of UUS-L do not necessarily read every message and are not responsible for material posted on UUS-L.
List address: To send a message to all the people currently subscribed to the list, just send mail to
UUS-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDUThis is called "sending mail to the list," because you send mail to a single address and LISTSERV makes copies for all the people who have subscribed. This address (UUS-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU) is also called the "list address." Never send LISTSERV commands (described in a minute) to that address, as they might be distributed to all UUS-L subscribers.
LISTSERV address: To unsubscribe, subscribe again, or change the way your subscription works, you send messages to LISTSERV, the program that serves as the central clearinghouse for all UUS-L messages. LISTSERV's address is
LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDUNo human reads these messages: instead, a computer program reads the commands in your e-mail message and executes those commands. Since computers have absolutely no imagination (or sense of humor), you have to get the commands exactly right or they don't work. Type the commands in the text (not the subject) of your message. To avoid typing mistakes, copy and paste the LISTSERV address and commands from this FAQ into an e-mail message.
List manager address: If you need to talk to the list manager, the human being who supervises UUS-L, write to:
UUS-L-REQUEST@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDUThe list manager for UUS-L is a volunteer named Lance Brown. UUS-L was originally created by Steve Traugott in 1993.
To unsubscribe (sign off) this list, send the following message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU:
SIGNOFF UUS-L
Type this as the first line of the text of your message, not the subject (which LISTSERV ignores). Don't include anything else in the message (no punctuation, no "please" or "thank you") or you'll confuse LISTSERV and get an error message in return. If possible, turn off any signature that your e-mail program might append. If you can't do this, type the word "END" on a line by itself following your SIGNOFF command. The END command tells LISTSERV to ignore the rest of the lines in your message.
If you want to subscribe again (or a friend wants to subscribe), send this line to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU:
SUBSCRIBE UUS-L yourname
Replace "yourname" with your actual name (not your e-mail address, which LISTSERV can see in the headers of your message). In response to your message, LISTSERV sends a request for you to confirm that you want to subscribe (this precaution prevents a third party from subscribing you against your will). Reply to the message, with the single work "ok" in the text of the message.
If your e-mail address changes, unsubscribe from UUS-L by sending an UNSUBSCRIBE command to LISTSERV from your old address. Then send a SUBSCRIBE command to LISTSERV from your new address.
If you can't send e-mail from your old e-mail address, send a polite message to the list manager (the human being, as described earlier in this message), asking for your address to be changed.
If your ISP changes its mail server, your address may change -- just slightly, but enough to confuse LISTSERV. For example, your ISP may begin inserting a machine name after the @ in your e-mail address (e.g., test@ivan.gurus.com instead of test@gurus.com). When this happens, LISTSERV may no longer recognize you as a subscriber. If this happens, ask the list manager for help (by sending a private e-mail message to the list manager address above).
Because UUS-L is a high-traffic list, when you first subscribe, you are in "digest mode." In digest mode, LISTSERV sends messages in batches, one or more batches a day. Instead of getting 20 separate messages, you get one or two long "digest" messages.
If you'd rather get messages individually (for example, if your e-mail program can filter all UUS-L messages into a separate mailbox, so you can read them in a batch anyway), send this message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU:
SET UUS-L ACK
(ACK is a mail mode in which you get messages separately, including ACKnowledgements of your own messages.)
If you decide to switch back to digest mode, send this message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU:
SET UUS-L DIGEST
If you don't want to get any messages at all, but you want your name to stay on the list of subscribers, send this command to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU:
SET UUS-L NOMAIL
To check your list settings, send this message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU:
QUERY UUS-L
UUS-L provides a forum for all kinds of UU-related discussion. The following rules apply to make the list work as well as possible. However, no set of rules will work for everyone. If you find these rules to be too onerous to follow, please consider signing off and creating your own list (try OneList at http://www.onelist.com or eGroups at http://www.egroups.com for free mailing lists). The list manager(s) of UUS-L insist on subscribers following these rules of "netiquette":
NO PERSONAL ATTACKS: Don't criticize people, criticize ideas. In particular, don't tell people that you know all about them and their thought processes, and that both are flawed. Instead, talk about the ideas contained in the person's posts. Instead of "You are a jerk and your posts are moronic," try "The following idea is wrong, and here's why …" And skip "From your posts, I can tell that you are …" altogether. As someone once said, "It is more important to be nice than to be right. It doesn't matter that you are channeling God's Thoughts if you are in everybody's killfile."
NO LONG QUOTES: When replying to a message, it is good practice to "quote" the relevant parts of the message. However, you should delete all the unrelated material, which everyone has presumably already had a chance to read. If you receive UUS-L in digest form, be sure to delete all the unrelated posts in the digest: otherwise, your 10-line reply may be followed by 200 lines of quoted digest.
SPEAK FROM YOUR EXPERIENCE: Write about what you think, what you feel, and what you have done. This works better that writing about what other people might be thinking, feeling, or experiencing in your opinion. Tell us what you think and why you think it. And take hot-button issues with a grain of salt and a large dollop of humor.
ATTENTION IS SUNLIGHT ON THE INTERNET. (Thanks to Doug Muder for this!) If a posting is boring, stupid, or repetitive, ignore and delete it. Responding just prolongs the agony. If you have a problem with a posting, write privately to the poster and/or to the list manager.
AVOID POINT-BY-POINT REFUTATION. Instead, respond to a person's ideas as a whole, expounding your own ideas.
ANSWER YOUR BEST CRITICS. Answer their best points. The discussion is a work of art that you and your opponents are creating together. Who do you want to work with? If you answer my weakest point, and then I pick out the weakest point of your answer, we are mutually choosing to have the worst discussion we could possibly have. When you answer the best points of your best critics, you grow.
NO JUNK MAIL. This includes chain letters, hoaxes, virus warnings, get-rich-quick schemes, and advertisements. If you are wondering whether a message is a hoax, check the CIAC Web site at http://ciac.llnl.gov.
STICK TO THE SUBJECT: If you radically change the subject under discussion, change the subject line, too.
NO TEST MESSAGES: If you want to test your e-mail address, write to test@gurus.com and see what happens. (Naturally, the UUS-L list manager may occasionally need to send a test message.) If you are not sure whether you are subscribed to UUS-L or whether your messages are getting through, wait until you have something to say.
NO HUGE MESSAGES OR ATTACHMENTS. If you have a file or large amount of information that you'd like to distribute, put it on the Web and send a message with the URL of the Web page. If you don't have a way to make a Web page, then send out a message about the file and ask people to contain you privately (not on the list) to ask you to send them the file privately.
NO FORMATTED E-MAIL: Tell your e-mail program not to use formatted e-mail (that is, no HTML, MIME, or RTF messages). In Eudora Pro or Light 4.0, choose Tools | Options, click the Styled Text category, and choose either Send Plain Text Only or Ask Me Each Time. If you use Outlook 98, don't use "stationery" when composing messages. Set the format of your outgoing mail to Plain Text. To choose the default mail format, choose Tools | Options to display the Options dialog box, and then click the Mail Format tab. In Outlook Express, control whether you send formatted messages by choosing Tools | Options to display the Options dialog box, and then clicking the Send tab. In Netscape Messenger 4.5, you can specify in your address book to always send a person HTML text by selecting the Prefers To Receive Rich Text (HTML) Mail option. You can also choose formatting options by choosing Edit | Preferences to display the Preferences dialog box. Click the Mail & Newsgroups category to see its subcategories, and then click the Formatting category.
DON'T POST COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL UNLESS YOU OWN THE COPYRIGHT. This includes stuff that comes from Web sites, e-mail messages, and Usenet newsgroup postings, all of which are automatically copyrighted by the authors.
All posts to UUS-L are filtered through a program called the "Talking Stick" (as well as through LISTSERV, the program that distributes messages to subscribers). The Talking Stick program is designed to prevent one or more subscribers from taking over the list with too many (or too long) posts. The Talking Stick keeps track of how much (in bytes) each person is sending to the list over the last week and use this to compute the average traffic/person. If someone sends so much text that they are sending more than 5 times average traffic level, their posts will be held up> until their traffic ratio falls below the threshold value. When posts are held up, the Talking Stick notifies the poster.
This means that the limiting factor placed on people depends on total list traffic, not some arbitrary posts/day limitation. It also encourage good posting etiquette:
John Levine, a former long-time UUS-L subscriber, maintains a publicly-accessible fully-searchable archive of UUS-L postings (keep this in mind when you post!) The archive is at this Web site:
http://www.iecc.com/uus-lIf you have comments about the UUS-L archive, write to webmaster@iecc.com.
Other UUS-L subscribers can determine that you are signed up to the list through the use of the REVIEW command, which returns the e-mail address and name of all the subscribers. If you do not want your name to be visible, send this command to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU:
SET UUS-L CONCEAL
To see the list of subscribers, send this command to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU:
REVIEW UUS-L
For more information about mailing lists, get "Internet: The Complete Reference," Millenium Edition (this is a shameless plug from Margy Levine Young and Doug Muder, co-authors of that book).
FAQ last updated January 24, 1999 by Lance Brown and Margy Levine Young with input from Howard Dobel.