The Tango-A and Tango-L instructions may seem long (but they are not complicated). Here are the most common posting errors that people make, in approximate decreasing order of frequency of occurrence, so please review at least these three most common errors in this brief e-mail before making a posting!
1. DON'T USE TANGO-L FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS. All announcements of Tango events must be made to Tango-A only (see Item 2 below). Also any "commercial" postings such as Tango videos for sale, etc., should only be made to Tango-A (under topic "MISC:"). Postings of a discussion nature that are not event announcements, even if they are geography-specific, may be made to Tango-L instead. These have been relatively rare (unfortunately, since they are usually interesting), but the recent posting on Tango in Cuba is a good example. Relating ones general Tango experience in Buenos Aires, or any other city for that matter, would also be a good candidate for Tango-L. Event announcements, however, and responses to event announcements (often corrections or supplemental information) should be made to Tango-A only. 2. REMEMBER TO SPECIFY THE TOPIC FOR POSTINGS TO TANGO-A (AND TO FOLLOW THE FORMAT BELOW EXACTLY, WITH THE COLON FOLLOWING THE TOPIC NAME): The topic should reflect where the event is HAPPENING (not the locations of the potential audience you wish to attract). Unless the posting is an announcement of a multi-city tour, please use only a single topic. Here is a list of topics, as a reminder, and the required format: The Tango-A list uses topics, which requires that the subject of every post be preceded with the topic name followed by a colon and a space (the colon and space are required). E.g., Subject: NA-W: This is an article for Western North America The topic names are based on geographical relevance and can be ONE of the following: SA (South America), NA-W NA-C NA-E (North America West, Central, East), EU-W EU-E (Europe West, East), AASP (Asia/ Africa/South Pacific) or MISC (non-geographical announcements). If you don't specify the topic, your posting will only reach those who subscribe to the digest version of the list (who get all postings anyway), which is a much smaller audience than you would otherwise get or than you probably intended. 3. SET YOUR MAILER TO SEND MAIL TO TANGO-A OR TANGO-L IN PLAINTEXT (NOT HTML): The options for doing this vary from mailer to mailer, but the three most common errors can be solved as follows: - Set your mailer to send e-mail in plaintext only (rather than HTML format or both plaintext + HTML) - Avoid cutting and pasting from a formatting word processing (use the mail composer's window directly instead), otherwise you sometimes get unnecessary MIME characters (the "=20" and other similar extraneous characters at the end of lines). - Don't quote or attach the entire original message. If it is necessary to set the context for a response to someone's comment, just quote the few lines or the paragraph. Some mailers will automatically attach the original message to a reply in which case you should compose a new message and copy and paste the original subject line. A message that is incorrectly formatted will result in many list members not seeing your mail in the most readable way, depending on the mailer they are using and how they have set it. The recommendations above should result in maximum compatibility with all mailers. If you have misplaced the original instructions you got when you subscribed to the list, you may get a copy by sending the following message in the body of an e-mail to [email protected]: get tango-a welcome or get tango-l welcome Thanks, Shahrukh Merchant Tango-A/Tango-L coadministrator [email protected] [email protected]
