ADS the list

[Damien Hall]

This is a long message;  it contains first some comments on the recent debate
about the number of subjects covered on ADS-L, and lower down some (more)
practical things that people can do to make it easier and quicker to read the
list.

COMMENTS

Before I got down to the posting that expressed dismay at the number of people
who'd unsubscribed in the previous short amount of time, I had exactly the same
thought.  It would be a real shame if this list didn't have such people on it.

I also agree with the sentiment expressed by Wilson and others that the list is
good the way it is, with all the breadth of topics that are covered in it.  It
would be a real shame if it became a low-traffic list like some of the others
that have been mentioned;  those lists are great, of course, and I love getting
e-mails from them when I get them, but it's also great to have the linguistic
liveliness of ADS-L in my Inbox every morning.

It's true, though, that ADS-L has such volume that it can be daunting.  For that
very reason, I have only recently come back onto the list after a year away,
since during that year I didn't have regular Internet access, and the number of
ADS-L messages I would have had to read every (irregular) time I could get
online would have been too much.  Even now that I have regular Internet access,
the number of ADS-L messages is still large.

PRACTICAL THINGS

My solution is to set the list to send messages in a daily digest, not as
individual messages.  By using this method, I have just scanned through all the
messages from yesterday in perhaps 10 minutes, and read in detail only the ones
of interest.  If I had received each message individually, the total time taken
to go to my e-mail program, click on each message, read it and deal with it
would have been much more than 10 minutes.  The digest for any given day
usually appears a few seconds after midnight EST.

There's also an option which sets digests to have a table of contents at the
beginning, so you can see at a glance what messages are in the list today.

These options can be set by sending to

listserv at listserv.uga.edu

a message with no subject-line and with the body starting with

set ADS-L

and continuing with

DIGEST    for a digest

or

DUALHDR    for the Table of Contents.

These options are cumulative, so you could send a message

set ADS-L DIGEST DUALHDR

(and-or other commands if necessary, separated by spaces) and it would be fine.

Sorry for the length of this, but I hope it helps some people!

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania

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