Mail and no mail

[Anthea <ATICC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

With all respect to my colleagues who have posted about the amount of mail
that started piling up in December on this list, one evern threatening to
sign off permanently if that sitation repeats itself, I have to say that
this is an unfair judgement and a short-term view.

December was a horrendous time for this list....it moved from one machine to
another, one operating system to another, one LISTSERV to another. That is
a huge amount of work and bound to be replete with wrongly posted and
duplicate messages. Of course there were personal messages on the net....
it was hard to tell where your message was going with the new system. I
consider myself a fairly computer literate person and I certainly know a
lot about LISTSERVs, but I was totally overwhelmed by the duplicate postings,
new addresses and so forth.  I would imagine that others were too. Perhaps a
little tolerance and patience are in order.

January is not a stellar time for academic lists...lots of them get quiet and
many get silly in the late-December/January period; but PEN-L has never just
totally *GONE*, disappeared, before. Even Doug Henwood is silent!

Unmoderated LISTS are one of the truly interesting areas of the Internet
because what they are and become depends totally on the postings of their
members....if members do not post, or post rubbish, the LIST does not exist
as an academic forum.

Peace,
Anthea Tillyer
City University of New York