> What does this mean? I saw a message from Jano but did not
> understand what it was referring to. Check in for what?
> If this is a reminder then I didn't get the original message.
> I'm only 'out of touch' when no-one tells me what's going on. 
> Please bear with me. If I had been on holiday myself and my
> 30 odd players would be distraught if you had suspended the
> list. 

If you had been on holiday, you had ought to have let me know.  
Else what happens if someone starts mailbombing your list and no 
one's in charge?
 
> I sent a message to listowners and it went to you for 
> approval. Have you unsubscribed me? I have only seen one

No, the list coughed at one point.  But your address has been 
returning "connection refused" messages, so you probably missed 
out on the message discussing that.

What is happening now is that the distribution lists are separate 
from the membership list.  This makes things more efficient (when 
a message goes out, it just snags the distribution list, which is 
purely addresses) but more prone to getting out of synch (the 
actual membership list got wiped out, including the configuration, 
so it defaulted to not permitting non-subscribers *and* everyone 
was a non-subscriber).

Anyway, this was probably More Than Anyone Wanted To Know, 
but the short explanation is "that's why only a few low-volume lists 
are on the new software."  (This one, westworld, and my local 
gaming group's.)

> message (from Jano) in the last few weeks. I saw the message
> below as it went to owner-arcadia but didn't see the copy
> that was sent to listowners. Perhaps everything is 
> happening in a group I'm not subscribed to? 

Nope.  Ibm.net just isn't letting all of your mail go through.  
Crosswinds.net was doing the same thing, except it was explicitly 
giving me a message indicating that it wasn't happy that I said I 
was phoenyx.net when my IP address resolves to wirebird.com.  I 
sent a nice letter to their postmaster, and now they just reject all 
mail because their servers are overloaded.  I guess that's an 
improvement.  Anyway, I'm not sure if that was what ibm.net was 
doing or what (I don't think so, since it wasn't staying queued up on 
our system which means *something* at ibm.net initially accepted 
it), but since you were on digest, if you missed one, you missed 
'em all.  I bumped you over to regular distribution for the duration, 
just in case.

> If you're asking whether my game is active then it is, but
> surely you could tell that from the message archives. If you
> sent mail to a list I'm not on to ask me whether I was on it,
> then, well, what can I say? 

Activity on a list isn't much help... the issue was whether people 
were receiving mail from listowners or not.  I had at least one 
former gamemaster who subscribed to this list to fulfill the 
requirement, then killfiled it so he didn't have to be bothered by it.  
Then he did the same thing with bounce messages.  Then he was 
surprised when I suspended the list.

I don't think anybody around here by this time is quite that wilfully 
ignorant, but you haven't had the only (hopefully intermittent) 
bouncing address, so that was the purpose of the ping.  I'm 
changing over the software (and the web hosting, and darn near 
everything else), and I need to have everyone on top of what's going 
on.  Right now, the Important Thing is to go to 
http://phoenyx.net/listowners (not www.phoenyx...) and edit your 
list settings (specifically, the waitlist/open status and the genre; 
you can ignore the quotas and pretty much anything else that's 
new, but if you don't change those two settings you'll end up with a 
"Discussion" list in a "Fantasy" genre).

The remaining missing listowners are ironswords (whose only 
activity this month has been "Is anything going on here?" queries 
from users), glenforgan (which is run by committee... that usually 
leads to "I thought someone else was going to handle that," and 
I'm probably going to resurrect open-gaming and boot that whole 
game over there), and pulp-adventure (which is pining for the fjords, 
I think, and David isn't answering mail.  That will leave Westwind as 
the sole surviving member of the Been Here Since We Went Live 
on the Internet Club).


--
Karen J. Cravens  silver@phoenyx.net
The Dog Ate My Sketchbook:  http://silver.phoenyx.net/