NavList:

Antoine, you wrote:
"May I suggest that "editing/correcting" one's own previous posts might also be added to our "wish list for improvements"?"

For you and Douglas and whoever else may have asked, sorry, but it's not possible.

NavList, to many of you appears to be a set of online message boards. But this is a slow evolution and it only appears like other online message boards. A substantial number of NavList's most prolific posters never visit the message boards at all. Instead, they participate by email, like a traditional "listserv" mailing list (which, in case you missed it, was a very popular means of collaborative discussion from the late 1990s with rapidly declining popularity in the past several years). These email participants send their posts to the NavList email posting address: NavList@fer3.com. They receive NavList messages either in a daily digest, which is a compilation of 24 hours worth of messages with a table of contents at the top, or they receive each message as a single separate email. Those separate emails are dispatched immediately as soon as a message is posted. So you see the problem?? Email cannot be "recalled". If you discover an error which you might like to fix ten minutes after you post, it's too late. The horse has already left the barn.

By the way, even when you post on the message boards, in order to maintain consistency in formatting and ordering of messages, your post is sent out as an email to the posting address. It's then sent to those NavList members who are signed up for individual members including two automatically monitored email addresses which receive messages from the servers. Those emails then appear on the message boards after a minute or two. I've tried to keep the whole system relatively fault-tolerant. Since there are two of these addresses located on entirely different email services, we no longer have the problem of messages going missing from the archives (which occurred on a very regular basis on the old archives at ir**.com --a note for the old-timers on NavList).

While I'm on NavList technical matters, twice in the past two weeks, we ran out of disk space for a few hours, both times on Saturdays. This was a nuisance which I did not understand at the time. As it turned it, it happened because I had failed to wrap my brain around the fact that we humans are not the primary readers of the NavList message boards. Around 97% of visits to NavList are from search engine bots. It seems that yahoo's bots were having a fun time digging through all of our messages in the past couple of weeks, searching them and indexing them as they like to do, and their reading generated huge numbers of temporary versions of all our attachments and binary files --hundreds of megabytes of extra files. Rather than fuss with some clever solution, I threw money at the problem and rented us another gigabyte of storage. That increases the normally available disk space by a factor five and should prevent any such problems for a couple of years.

Also, I will be removing the six-hour digest and summary options for NavList soon since no one has signed up for them. I assume the daily options satisfy everyone's digestive requirements. The six-hour digests and summaries will still be available by request, just not as a visible selection.

-FER

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