New List serve functionality is available ...

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Spike
Chief Rivet Banger
Posts: 4013
Joined: Thu Oct 14, 2004 8:40 pm
Location: Baltimore, MD
Contact:

New List serve functionality is available ...

Post by Spike »

We are happy to "officially" announce that rivetbangers.com now supports a fully functioning list serve type of service that is integrated into the bbs.

For many people within the RV community a web based communication medium such as this one does not support their needs and availability for communication as well as the email list type distribution lists. In order to make rivetbangers.com a more useful site to those that fit into this category we now have integrated email list serve functionality.

What does it do?
  • The bbs now generates an email to be sent out to the list serve whenever a post is made to the bbs. That email will contain the contents of the post that generated it.
  • List serve users may also respond to that email which will not only go out to all other list serve users but will also appear as a properly threaded reply on the bbs itself.
  • List serve users can also start a new thread of conversation in any of the forums that they desire. All emails will be archived in the database along in their threaded format along with the web based submissions.
How is this any different that is currently available with other lists?
  • The biggest difference is that with email clients that support HTML messages (most all that are used currently) the emails that are generated by this system will look just like the posts that are on the web. That is to say that the emails will contain most all of the formating and graphics that are found in the web based version of the post. This includes images! For instance if a user posts a picture and then asks a question regarding that picture, the email users will also see that picture in their email just as if they were looking at the website. BB code is also supported in the email system.
  • When searching the archives for information that has been discussed in the past, you will be able to retrieve that information and view it in the threaded format in which it was generated. You can then read through the converstaions in one sitting without having to click around to get to each message.
  • Since email lists are subscribed to by forum, there is a higher resolution to the topics that you may subscribe to, or alternately, not subscribe to. We think with our choice of focused topics it will be easier to zero in on what it is you care to monitor/discuss and ignore the rest.
  • The last and potentially greatest advantage to this is that it will allow both the web based users and the email based users of the RV community to congregate and nteract together in one place which allows for threaded conversations and better content management and archival.
How do I sign up?
  • The first step in subscribing to the list is to register yourself as a user of the bbs. While we do fully support anonymous participation here for the bbs we need to have a valid email address for email list participants. Along these lines if we were to allow users to post from unkown email addresses we would be opening ourselves up to spam or DOS attacks from the internet.
  • Once you are logged in as a member simply click on "List Serve Subscriptions" here or in the menu at the top of the bbs pages. That will take you to a page with a pull down menu that allows you to subscribe to a forum. Subscribe to as many or as few as you wish.
  • Thats it, your done!!
Once you have taken those steps you will then be signed up to receive email updates from the forums that you have subscribed to. If you want to respond to a topic, simply click on reply and type up your responses!! If you want to gerenate a new topic simply compose a new email (do not reply to an old one) and send it to the email address for the forum you wish to post to. The list of email address to forums is below.

Some notes to keep in mind
  • When responding to an email please do not keep more of the original email than necessary in your response. Otherwise the email threads will grow large and will also clutter up the web threads on the site. We believe this to also be normal courtesy within the current email lists.
  • When starting a new thread from scratch do not simply reply to a message and clean it's contents & subject. Messages that come from rivetbangers.com have special headers that will cause your new topic to be appended to the thread for which you clicked "reply." If you desire to start a new thread compose a new message and address it to the forum/email list in which you wish it to be placed.
We hope you find this new functionality a very useful one and if you have any questions please feel free to ask.


-- John & Patti


Here are the email addresses for each of the forums. Use the appropriate one when starting a new topic in a forum:
Last edited by Spike on Tue Nov 29, 2005 4:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
http://www.rivetbangers.com - Now integrating web and mail!
Current Build: 2 years into a beautiful little girl

Spike
Chief Rivet Banger
Posts: 4013
Joined: Thu Oct 14, 2004 8:40 pm
Location: Baltimore, MD
Contact:

Post by Spike »

Deleted post topic split to its own thread in this forum.
http://www.rivetbangers.com - Now integrating web and mail!
Current Build: 2 years into a beautiful little girl

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