[Harp-L] where'd my post go? an explanation



The SPAH Jazz jam discussion had 9 posts get delayed in sending.  This is
a particularly over the top instance of this but it happens pretty much
all the time.  Here is an explanation of the various reasons it happens
and some suggestions on how to avoid having your post held.

Multiple recipients, this means the cc.  We allow a maximum of 3
recipients.  That means the list address plus 2.  Anything more than that
and your post is held for approval.  bcc, do not blind carbon copy
anything to the list if you want it to appear normally. All bcc posts are
held for approval.  Many people use bcc to send out announcements to
multiple recipients, holding bcc allows us to filter the content.  Over
the limit posts.  To prevent digests from being re-sent to the list in a
reply we have a posting size limit.  It's 15kb.  The digest is always
larger than 15kb.  This makes it impossible to directly send a quoted
digest to the list.  A consequence of the posting size limit is ANY post
over that limit will get held.  Long discussion, lots of quoted text,
composed in an html format, you will be over the limit.  A suggestion for
avoiding this problem is to post in plain text.  You can post more than
twice as many characters in plain text with out bumping into the limit as
you can with an html formatted post.  Here's another reason a post can go
astray.  Wrong address.  Somehow people get the idea to send posts to
harp-l-bounces AT harp-l.org.  I'll get the message as a bounce report.  I
can see the text but I have no easy way to get it to the list.  It can
take me days to get around to responding to an uncaught bounce because it
requires more than a little time to do it.

My personal subjective opinion regarding long line by line replies to
posts. They're pretty much impossible to read.  The longer they are the
harder they are to read.  I hope everybody is getting along with each
other and it's all polite because I have no idea.  I cannot parse these
very long point by point responses.  I just give up mid way and delete
them.  I have no idea who said what.  If it's important to you that people
read and understand your posts you might consider evolving a different
style of response.  This is not an admonition just a suggestion and it is
certainly not an invitation to discussion of this topic on the list.  I'm
using the prerogative of the bully pulpit to engage in the meta.

Finally to anyone whose post has been held I apologise sincerely for the
delay.  It's procedural not personal and I hadn't been at the control
console for more than 12 hrs because of circumstances.  Great discussions!
 harp-l-listowner



This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.