Greetings BPS-NET Subscribers,
For the past few years Jaime Gomez and I have shared the duties of moderating BPS-NET. I usually moderate from January through June and Jaime covers the rest of the year. Since my part of the year is about to end, I thought it would be a good time to list some information that can help you make better use of this list.
1. When you want to respond to a message think hard about whether you want to reply to the whole list or just to the person that posted the message. If you hit the "reply" button on your email, you are submitting a response to the whole list. In most cases you want to respond to the individual instead of the whole list. You would be surprised at the number of messages we get that say something like: "Hi Bob, don't tell my department chair but that job you just posted looks really interesting..." So, look for the individual's email in the body of the message and send your reply to that address.
2. Related to that last point - When you submit a message to the list, please include your email address so that people can contact you directly.
3. The list is moderated so you do not need to panic if you accidentally send something to the list. We have to approve each message before it goes out to the whole list and we usually catch these accidents. If you want to be extra sure, send a message to both of us directly { jaime.gomez@unizar.es; scottgj@okstate.edu }.
4. To submit a message to the list simply send the message to BPS-NET@aomlists.pace.edu. We do not have any ability to edit the messages that are submitted. We can only approve or reject them. Therefore, submit your message exactly as you want it to go out to the list. If you say, "Can you please distribute this to the list?" at the beginning of the message then that question will be in the message that goes out to everyone.
5. Anyone can submit messages to BPS-NET, however if you are not a subscriber (or if you submit your message from a different email account) you need to confirm your post. When you submit a message the server will automatically generate an email asking you to confirm that you did, in fact, just post that message. Sometimes we get queries from people who submitted a message but have not seen it posted. This is usually caused by the posting person's junk-mail filter that has blocked the confirmation email. So, if you do not receive a confirmation email within 5 or 10 minutes of submitting a message, check your junk-mail folder.
6. Occasionally a subject comes up that sparks an extended conversation. Many people love these conversations but many other people see this as reason to unsubscribe. If it looks like your issue will generate a lot of responses we may ask that you take the conversation off-line and report back to the list some kind of summary of the response that you got.
7. You can manage your own subscription to the list by going to http://aomlists.pace.edu and clicking on "Subscribers Corner." Here you can unsubscribe, choose whether to receive messages immediately or a summary once a week, and change the format of the messages (text or HTML).
If you have any comments or questions about this information, please respond directly to me at scottgj@okstate.edu.
Scott Johnson
Associate Professor
Oklahoma State University
405-744-5107
323 Business Building
Stillwater, OK 74078