A Guide to our online Bulletin Board - 15th Street Friends Meeting NYC

A Guide to our online Bulletin Board - October 2005

The Fifteenth Street Meeting community has an informal online Bulletin Board, where individual persons may post notices regarding matters of community interest. As such, the opinions expressed there are made individually, and do not represent the Meeting at large. The following brief User’s Guide to our Bulletin Board has been written by Vijay Wijesundera, except as noted.

(1). READING: Presently, our Bulletin Board is setup as a Google^TM Group. Since June 2006, only the registered members of the Group may freely access the entire Group archive online at: http://groups.google.com/group/15thStreetFriends

(2). JOINING: With membership, you may post messages, and also choose to have copies of new posts automatically delivered to you by email. To join the Group, follow the “Join this group” link on the Group home page. That requires you to disclose your e-mail address and choose a password for this Group. While the online registration takes only a minute, verification of membership has to be done manually by our Group Administrator, and might take a day or two.

(3). E-MAIL DELIVERY: The default delivery setting for new members of the Group is, “each new message as it’s posted”. The worst part of the default setting is that these e-mails appear as if they come from the poster, and not from the Group. Any direct reply to such an e-mail would also get posted, and sent to whoever has signed-up to receive messages by e-mail as well. The latter feature may be useful, and is highly recommended, in updating a given topic or "thread". But in other situations, when replying to a Group e-mail, you may want to carefully check the list of intended recipients of your reply, in the “To:” and “Cc:” fields.

(4). E-MAIL DELIVERY PREFERENCES: Once you join, and sign-in, you may change e-mail preferences etc by following the link "Unsubscribe or change membership". For example, you may choose to receive only "Abridged Email" - an automatically generated summary of new activity each day. Such abridged e-mails appear in your Inbox as coming from "15thStreetFriends Group".

(5). NICKNAME: While you are there, you may also want to pick a suitable Nickname, so that your posts would be primarily listed by that nickname instead of your e-mail address.

(6). POSTING MESSAGES: An unregistered person may request to post a message, by sending it to the Group Administrator, currently John Elfrank-Dana, or to any other member. A member of the Group may post a message or a reply by e-mailing it to [email protected] or, preferably, by signing-in to the Google Group at the URL given above in (1).

(7). ATTACHMENTS: [Note by Richard Accetta-Evans] If a message sent to the Group has an attachment, this Attachment will be forwarded to those who elected to receive each e-mail as it is sent. However, those who elected to receive the summary or to have the e-mails grouped together and sent at regular intervals will not see the attachment.

(8). UNMASKING OF E-MAIL ADDRESSES: When a message is posted to a group, Google masks part of every email address with three dots (…), as an anti-spamming measure. To remove email masking from a topic, click on the three dots (...) in the middle of any masked email address appearing in that topic. On the page that appears upon clicking, simply type the letters of the squiggly word into the box that appears below it and click "OK".

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