ZMLEB@SCFVM.BITNET (Lee Brotzman) (01/12/89)
It appears that there are many people on the net that are either unaware
of or do not understand the links between Usenet's comp.lang.forth news group
and the FIGI-L mailing list on BITNET. The purpose of this message is to
describe how the two groups on the two networks are allowed to communicate.
The Forth Interest Group International List (FIGIL) was concieved and
operated by Tamir Weiner on the BITNET network at node WEIZMANN in Israel.
The list worked by having members send mail messages to Tamir. He would
then gather the messages together and periodically mail them to each
member of the mailing list. Due to growing demands on his time, he was no
longer able to continue as moderator of the list. I volunteered to take
over his duties, and the list was transferred to my BITNET site, SCFVM at
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Soon after I became the FIGIL moderator, our site installed the LISTSERV
mailing list server. This program performs many advanced mail and file
handling functions, such as mailing list maintenance by user commands,
automatic mail redistribution, file archival and distribution on request, etc.
A mailing list was created for FIGIL and given the BITNET mailing address of
FIGI-L@SCFVM (following the naming conventions common amongst LISTSERV
mailing lists). New members on BITNET or other networks can request to
receive FIGI-L mail by sending a mail message to LISTSERV@SCFVM.BITNET.
The body of the mail message should contain only the following line:
SUBSCRIBE FIGI-L Your Name
LISTSERV will put your network address and name into the FIGI-L mailing list
and whenever a mail message is sent to FIGI-L@SCFVM, LISTSERV will auto-
matically send the mail message to you.
FIGI-L now has subscribers from Belgium, Canada, Chile, Finland, France,
Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway,
Switzerland, Taiwan, and 22 of the 50 United States.
When Tamir had the moderator job, he arranged to have postings to Usenet's
comp.lang.forth news group sent to him for inclusion in FIGIL. The same is
true for FIGI-L. Thanks to the good graces of Erik Fair at Berkeley, all
messages that are posted to comp.lang.forth are mailed directly to FIGI-L,
where they are distributed to the group on BITNET. I also have the ability
to post FIGI-L messages that originate on BITNET to Usenet. The effect is
that every posting to one network is seen on the other.
When FIGI-L went "interactive", meaning that mail messages are distributed
as soon as received, I got some complaints from a few people that preferred the
previous digest format. In response, I have been keeping notebooks of the
FIGI-L and Usenet traffic, which I periodically send to a private list called
FIGI-D, for FIGI-L Digest.
LISTSERV has the capability to store these notebooks and other files for
distribution to list members on request. Unfortunately, our system has not
had the available disk space to hold them, so this feature remains unused
for now. Hopefully, this situation will change, and FIGI-L can be turned
into a file server as well as a mail server.
I hope this clears up any confusion about the relationship between the
Usenet and BITNET Forth groups. If you didn't care about it in the first
place, I apologize for wasting your bandwidth. You can forward questions
to me at ZMLEB@SCFVM.BITNET or zmleb@scfvm.gsfc.nasa.gov in Internet (that
is, if your mailer knows about our node -- we were only connected to
Internet recently). If you think your question might have global appeal,
send it to FIGI-L@SCFVM.BITNET, and it will be distributed across the
BITNET list. If you are getting this message from comp.lang.forth, your
reply will be forwarded to FIGI-L through the gateway discussed above.
Isn't networking wonderful?
-- Lee Brotzman (FIGI-L Moderator)