25.4142, All: Changes in the LISTSERV and website configuration

Mon Oct 20 17:00:38 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-4142. Mon Oct 20 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.4142, All: Changes in the LISTSERV and website configuration

Moderators: Damir Cavar, Indiana U <damir at linguistlist.org>
            Malgorzata E. Cavar, Indiana U <gosia at linguistlist.org>

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Anthony Aristar <aristar at linguistlist.org>
Helen Aristar-Dry <hdry at linguistlist.org>
Sara Couture, Indiana U <sara at linguistlist.org>

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Editor for this issue: Malgorzata Cavar <gosia at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 13:00:13
From: Malgorzata Cavar [gosia at linguistlist.org]
Subject: All: Changes in the LISTSERV and website configuration

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=25-4142.html&submissionid=35970137&topicid=1&msgnumber=1

Dear LINGUIST List subscribers,

as we were informing you some weeks ago, the relocation of the LINGUIST List
to Indiana University involved significant changes of the IT-technology and
infrastructure. These changes were all necessary, and aiming at the
improvement of the service and the reduction of extremely high software
licensing costs. The transfer was not simple and easy, and we are happy that
we are almost done with the changes and the migration of all services. The
number of disruptions and problems should be reduced significantly in the next
days.

LISTSERV issues

Unfortunately, all the changes caused some issues with the mailing list. As
far as the LISTSERV is concerned, some of your individual settings were reset
in the configuration due to the software migration and update. Many
subscribers of the LINGUIST list set their subscription status in the past to
''no mail'' instead of unsubscribing. They were still subscribed, but did not
receive any email from LINGUIST. This setting has been reset and they started
receiving again emails from LINGUIST, wondering about that, being convinced
that they unsubscribed long time ago. For some subscribers this happened after
years of silence from LINGUIST. Some subscribers used an old email address to
subscribe and do not remember it anymore. To be able to post to LINGUIST or
provide specific information on the website using your login and password, you
do not need to be subscribed to the list. The website uses a different
password which is not linked to the accounts on the list-server, and everybody
can submit to the LINGUIST List.

We have corrected many problems with personal accounts, and we are sorry for
causing this flooding of your mailbox. If we could have avoided this problem,
we would have done so. It was technically impossible to handle all the
thousands of email addresses and accounts individually (we estimate more than
100,000 subscribers in all hosted lists on our servers), and the migration of
the servers had to happen in a very short period of time.
You can change the configuration of the LISTSERV easily yourself. If you are
being flooded with LINGUIST emails and do not want to read those, or if you
want to subscribe only to LINGLITE or set the mode to Daily Digest, go to the
link at the bottom of every mail to configure your account:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/linguist

At the bottom of the page is a button ''Unsubscribe or edit options'' that
takes you to a simpler form, which allows you to unsubscribe or receive a
reminder about your password. You need to provide the email address with which
you registered, nothing else, i.e. a password is not necessary.

If you select ''Unsubscribe'', you will receive a confirmation email with a
link that you have to click to finalize the unsubscribe process. It is that
simple.
If you did not receive or set a password, or if you do not remember it, you
can get a reminder by clicking ''Remind''.

If you want to change your subscription setting to receive a Daily Digest (one
large mail with all LINGUIST mails of the day), you can log in via the web
interface at the URL above and configure your account, or simply send an email
from your subscribed email account to:

linguist-request at listserv.linguistlist.org

with the following text in either the Subject-line or Body of the email:

set digest plain

If you want to subscribe to LINGUIST or LINGLITE, please use the web-interface
at the respective URLs to do so, and select all the options accordingly
(digest mode, MIME or plain, etc.):

LINGUIST:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/linguist

LINGLITE:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/linglite

We are now using the open source list-server software Mailman. It is used at
many institutions all over the world, and it is well documented online. Your
local system administrator or IT-team should be able to help you with issues
related to your subscription. If you have problems changing your subscription
status or local experts cannot help you, let us know.

Social media

You might have noticed that besides email as a dissemination channel of
LINGUIST List postings, there is a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a
Google+ page where links to all your postings from LINGUIST List are
published. These social media sites and accounts are used now by more people
than the mailing list.

RSS feeds

We have changed the settings and configuration of the RSS-feed of LINGUIST
List. It is now freely available without registration, and if you use some
RSS-feed plugin in your browser, you should see the provided RSS-feeds in the
appropriate browser menu. The meta information about the RSS-feeds is
integrated into the meta-information of every LINGUIST List webpage.

Other meta-information

We are working on the extension of the meta-information of the pages to
support common meta-tags for publications or content types that is used by for
example Google Scholar, Pinterest, or other systems that aggregate content
information and provide very useful insights or linking mechanisms. This means
that adding information about people, institutions, programs, papers,
dissertations, and publications on the LINGUIST List pages and submission of
such information to LINGUIST will have an impact on for example Google Scholar
scores and links. It will definitely help to discover such content much easier
using advanced facilities that go beyond of classical search engines. We would
be happy to extend these meta-tagging strategies to information about
linguistically relevant software, language data and corpora.

Once again, sorry for the inconvenience and extra work with the individual
configurations of the LISTSERV accounts.

We hope that you stay with us and continue supporting the LINGUIST List
service improvements.

Sincerely,
The LINGUIST List Team

Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable

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