----[Please read http://ercoupers.com/disclaimer.htm before following any advice in this forum.]----
Roger suggested: > On the Aeronca list, to which I also subscribe, when we have an > occasional urge to express ourselves on a non specific Aeronca > related subject, we place #### at the beginning of the subject line. > That gives everyone a heads up to push the delete button if not > interested in a non Aeronca specific opinion. Roger, That's a good and reasonable suggestion. However, our issue is one level deeper. For years, we've asked people to start their subject line with "OFF TOPIC" when it is off the lists' topic themes. But Ralph quoted the list purpose from http://ercoupers.com/lists.htm where it says, "Tech is a moderated list for just technical discussions about maintaining and flying Ercoupes. A moderated list means that anything that doesn't meet this requirement will not be posted." What we seem to be discussing is: what do we mean by the words "maintaining and flying Ercoupes"? >From inception, we've allowed and even encouraged people to post discussions about Coupes, for sure, but also about flying technique, general mechanical subjects, aviation regulations and such. For some, this is the only aviation forum to which they belong. So, it seems desirable to include those subject areas in our discussion. Indeed, I subscribe to about 12 other forums and I've seen the best discussion of a lot of issues here, on this list. I don't think I would want to make people put a tag on items that were not explicitly Coupe specific - to much that is critical to Coupe pilots is general aviation knowledge. But I think that as long as we do a good job of keeping the subject line matching the content, Ralph and others will be able to hit delete easily. (As a side issue, we implemented moderation a couple of times when there were serious problems. When the problems subsided, we removed moderation.) Also, as Ralph correctly pointed out, it's CRITICAL for people replying to digest messages to trim all the unwanted stuff. Otherwise, we get the whole day's message traffic attached to the bottom of the reply. It's also very important to check the subject line before sending a reply - CRITICALLY so when you use digest mode, so we know the true subject of a message. Actually, I'd agree that it's really good to trim all unwanted prior text in all messages. By the way, even in digest mode, each message usually has the To, From and Subject lines. When I've used digest, I just hit page down, skipping the subjects in which I was not interested. Thanks, guys and gals for discussing this calmly and thoughtfully. Ed Burkhead http://edburkhead.com ed -at- edburkhead???.com (change -at- to @ and remove "???") ============================================================================== To leave this forum go to: http://ercoupers.com/lists.htm
