clayart listserv

The server was down this weekend, and the problem should have been corrected this morning. I did get some mail from clayart this AM, though it may take a while for the moderators to work through the backlog. We are a chatty bunch :>) Wayne Seidl

Came in this evening (Monday 26th), nothing yesterday!

Might be the server down; it's happened before!

Steve Bath UK

In article , Janet Price writes

What is ClayArt listserv? How does one access this resource? Kathy

Kathy: Go to:

see!One caveat: If you do sign up for clayart on the server, be aware that there are over 3500 members worldwide, including Egypt, Israel, Denmark Poland, Czech Republic Australia, etc.

Mail messages can run into the hundreds per day. Learn where your delete key is :>)

Hope that helps, Wayne Seidl

Thanks and thanks for the warning. My husband is connected to a sort of listserv re homebuilt helicopters and yes, communications run heavy and often. What a wonderful informational world we're living through the beginning of...(glad if you're not an Eng. pedant). For the record, I'm learning at least as much through this newsgroup as from my class--other than hands on development.

Kathy

If that's the case, then clayart is like being let loose in the Library of Congress. Amazing what one can absorb just by reading, as if clay education came by osmosis :>) Best, Wayne Seidl

Yeap! For those that might not want to receive all the email, you can read Clayart postings on Yahoo -

't know that you can post through Yahoo though.deg

What I'm finding out is that reading and the inter-communication with this newsgroup allows one to absorb the periferal material which cannot be gleaned only through the hands-on-work, or by the lectures/advice of a single instructor. Combing the inputs, especially now when the learning curve is so steep, is effective. Tomorrow when I return to the studio/wheel and such, I will bring to my experience many new tidbits and ideas and bits of knowlege, all enhancing my work.

Kathy

BTW: how long does it take for the acknowlegement email to arrive? Can I expect it this evening? Kathy

You should receive it within 24 hours.

The confirmation e-mail should be fairly quick. They did have some problems with the server over the weekend, so if you do not get a confirmation by the end of today, I would try to unsubscribe and re-subscribe, and see if that brings the confirmation. It's what I had to do. You're dealing with a machine for that, not a human.

You will also find that the archives are a wonderful resource for glaze recipes, technique, just about any question you could have (including the dumb ones I ask :>)

Wayne Seidl

One other tip to help deal with the blizzard of Clayart mail is to specify Digest format. You'll get one huge Email every day (except when the server is down!) that runs typically 100-200 Kbytes. That way you don't have to figure out what's Clayart and what's spam or other stuff... the listserv moderators insure there is no spam in the Clayart stuff. However, the great long Digests will indeed have a lot of stuff you won't care about, and you can't just hit a delete key.

Sigh. Wouldn't it be great to have Clayart as a newsgroup like this (or a part of this)? That way posts that are on the same topic are automatically grouped together, and you could hit Ignore on any thread you don't care about. You would always know what NG you were in, so you wouldn't need to sort email into the proper categories. There would be no need for moderators, since spam is exceedingly rare (and usually obvious) in NGs. The Clayart moderators say that many posts are rejected, so presumably there would be even more traffic in the NG. But Ignore would do the same job, I suspect, and if you want to read something that the moderator regards as off-topic or too political, hey, we are all big boys and girls here!

My guess is that there would be a lot of resistance to getting Clayart to abandon it's time-honored listserv format. There may, in fact, be people who can't get NG service from their ISP, whereas everyone can get Email.

There actually *is* a Clayart NG that was evidently created long ago, before Mel (Clayart's moderator) took over. It was supposed to be a mirror of the listserv, but apparently never got "wired up". I haven't had any luck so far in finding out what would be needed to get this working... no response from the authorities in charge of these things. But a mirror would seem to be the perfect solution for all concerned.

Just my 0.02 cents worth!

Bob Masta dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom D A Q A R T A Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

Actually Bob, you can set most browsers to sort by thread, so it comes in that way. Personally, I sort by "received" and "sender" so I can always get to the latest posts from people I actually enjoy reading. As for the moderators, well, I know them personally, and know that they aren't really biased. I've had my share of posts rejected for whatever reason, so I know they're being fair :>) I regard the moderators as just one more "wall" keeping the nasty viral critters out of my system. Just a thought, Wayne Seidl

Wayne, I'm not sure what the hottest Email software has these days, but I think they all get confused unless the replies use the identical topic. Check Clayart (easy with the Digest) and you will see that quite a few people see fit to change things slightly.

What's more, NG reader programs (or at least Free Agent) indent the replies to show who you are responding to, not just the overall topic.

My understanding is that Mel spends about 4 hours a day moderating Clayart. I don't know how much time Joyce spends. Whatever, that seems like an appallling waste of precious talent to me, since nothing would be needed on an unmoderated NG. Think of all the pots the world is being denied! Or all the wisdom, if they spent that time posting morsels for the rest of us!

I'm not worried about biased moderators, just that it's such a waste for no real gain. OK, maybe a little gain if you count those rare virus NG messages. But if your reader is like mine, you can see the message size before you download each message. I've never seen any virus that wasn't pretty conspicuous in that respect. Besides, Email is a *much* more common path of virus transmission.

Again, just my 2 cents' worth.

Bob Masta dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom D A Q A R T A Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis