Indology FAQ

[stephen.miller at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk]

>It was recently suggested by Adrian Burton that an INDOLOGY FAQ, posted
>once a month, could help to cut down on some of the repetitive
>administrative traffic that gets posted to INDOLOGY by having such
>details as how to unsubscribe (send "unsub indology" to
>"listserv at liverpool.ac.uk"), the aims of INDOLOGY, that the aryans came
>from outside india, how to get INDOLOGY sent in digest format, and
>whatnot.
>

My Two Pennies Worth: when you see messages such as unsub / signoff or the
plea for someone to take them off the list, more bandwidth is taken up by
people relying to the list to tell such people how to unsub / signoff that
ever was used in the first place. A similar thing has just happened with
another list I am on for Folklore Studies: it seems a class used the
folklore-l to bounce messages back to a class meeting on computing for
folklorists. Well, *4* people did in total. This was met with message after
message saying, `Hey! You're using this list not for what it is meant to be
used for'. Followed by message after message saying, `Good for you for
telling them  `Hey! You're using this list not for what it is meant to be
used for''... Either leave the chore to the List Administrator (which is
why such people should receive annual bonuses in precious metals) or take
it on yourself and mail personally to the person in question and keep the
list out of it.



Stephen Miller
National Academic Typesetting Service
Oxford University

stephen.miller at oucs.ox.ac.uk