As I promised a couple of weeks ago, in my long posting describing Tango-L operation, I was investigating the possibility of a list for announcements of Tango events. This was in response to the apparent contradiction between those who (a) felt that postings of local events were irrelevant on Tango-L owing to their interest to too small a fraction of the Tango-L membership and (b) those who felt that Tango-L was just the sort of forum where such information should be disseminated to the Tango community.
The new list TANGO-A is in place (took a few days longer than I thought it would), and is designed to complement TANGO-L, so that the needs of BOTH groups (a) and (b) above can be met. You will receive more detailed information about it shortly, but here is a summary: 1. The list is called Tango-A (Announcements of Tango Events Worldwide). While it is technically a separate list from Tango-L, it will operate as a sub-list (or complementary list, depending on your point of view) of Tango-L. Tango-L will remain focussed on more general discussions related to Tango. 2. All members of Tango-L are automatically ALREADY subscribed to Tango-A. (If your subscription to Tango-L was set to "nomail," your subscription to Tango-A will also be set to nomail in a few days after the initial mailings describing Tango-A operation have been sent (this is for the benefit of those who might have gone on vacation and didn't want their mail to pile up). However, subsequent subscribers will have to subscribe to the two lists separately (and those unsubscribing may also unsubscribe to either or both separately). 3. Announcements of local events (commercial or otherwise) are explicitly permitted on Tango-A--there are guidelines, of course, on maximum frequency and such to avoid repetitive submissions. 4. Tango-A has a unique and powerful feature that permits (in fact, requires) those submitting postings to indicate the geographical area that their posting applies to, selected from one of 8 "topics": - SA (South America, which we expect will focus on Buenos Aires) - NA-E, NA-C, NA-W (North America East, Central, West) - EU-W, EU-E (Europe West, East) [members from Europe are invited to send e-mail to [email protected] with suggestions for alternative divisions as well as the definition of these divisions] - AASP (Asia, Africa and South Pacific--basically "rest of world"). - MISC (Announcements that are not geography-specific, e.g., announcement of a new source for Tango music) [This classification is based on geography, expected number of postings, and level of Tango activity, and can be adjusted based on usage. Please send suggestions in this regard to [email protected].] The beauty of this system is that while those POSTING submissions need to specify the one category that is most appropriate to their announcment, the distribution of this information is not restricted to those who reside in that area, since list members may subscribe to ANY or ALL topics. In fact, the default is for subscribers to receive postings on ALL topics, and those who want to limit the topics they receive can do so easily (see next item). 5. When SUBMITTING a posting, the topic name MUST be included in the subject line and followed by a colon. E.g., Subject: NA-C: Tango in Dallas Texas If you wish to limit the postings you RECEIVE to a subset of topics, you may do so by sending e-mail to <[email protected]> with the command "set tango-A topics: topic1 topic2 ...." E.g., if you only wanted to receive postings for Europe and South America, and for the "misc" category, you would issue the command set tango-A topics: EU-W EU-E SA MISC (By default, you are set to receive all topics.) 6. Digests are available, but since only one daily digest is created for the whole list, the "topics" feature cannot be used to create a customized digest--those subscribed as "digest" will always get all submissions to Tango-A, regardless of how they set their "topics." Your initial subscription is non-digest (even if it was "digest" on Tango-L). 7. A banner will automatically be inserted at the bottom of postings to summarize the topics usage (this will decrease in frequency once people get used to the topic names). 8. You may start to use Tango-A now for announcements of your Tango events! It is also appropriate for the "Where can I find Tango in XXX" type questions. Enjoy! Shahrukh
