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IWAI's Discussion Forum and Mailing Lists
Since 1999, the IWAI has operated two
email mailing-lists. From 2008, this has been joined by a web-based forum.
The forum can be found here. The
forum archive (1999 to 2007) can be found
here.
All of the lists below are open to members and non-members of
IWAI. |
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About our Forum and Mailing Lists:
- The News Updates Mailing List is a one-way list: you will get messages
from it (usually not more than one or two a week) but cannot post messages to
it. It provides navigation information (e.g. lock closures), marine notices,
announcements of events, notice of consultations and other waterways news.
(These items are also sent to the subscribers to the Waterways mailing-list.)
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- The Waterways Mailing List
/ Waterways Forum is a lively discussion group, where everything
and anything of waterways interest is up for debate. The number of posts/messages per
day varies, but has ranged from 1 to 40, the 'norm' being ~10. Personal ads
(e.g. selling your own boat) are permitted but trade ads are not. Have a
look at recent posts. You
can subscribe to a combined email/forum offering or only to the web-based
forum. The web-based forum also supports RSS feeds.
This orange button can be used to quickly view the last few posts to the
forum with a single click.
There are some limitations in the interoperability of the email system and
the web-based forum. These limitations
are explained in detail here. There are also additional
guidelines for email users to help keep the web
and email in synch!
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RSS 
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- As an alternative to subscribing to the waterways mailing list, you can
subscribe to the Waterways Mailing List Digest. It includes all postings
made in the previous twenty-four hours to our waterways mailing list, but with
the digest, the emails are grouped and sent to you daily at 04:30 (Irish time) -
delivered in time to be enjoyed with the breakfast. The postings are sorted in
chronological order within topic. The Digest is a good option to consider for
dealing with the potentially large number of emails that greet us after a few
days absence from our computers. You will need to
read the guide to
reading Digest emails in order to configure your computer to read the
digest.
Note that if you wish to subscribe to the digest as an alternative to the
waterways mailing list, you will still have to unsubscribe from the waterways
mailing list. Please note also that the digest cannot be read if you use eircom.net's
webmail client. It can be read by other web-based email such as hotmail and
yahoomail.
Note that with the web-based forum, we support a method to allow you to
quickly view the last few posts (the RSS button). We expect to see
this digest option fade away!
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There are four steps to the subscription process:

We'll ask you to select your subscription options. You must agree out
Terms and Conditions and Usage
Guidelines, which aren't onerous!. We do ask you to tell us a
bit about yourself. Leaving everything blank will lead to delays in the
subscription process - we're human, and will probably not bother processing "Joe Bloggs" who'se email address is
erfnjk543@hotmail.com ! Finally, there are lots of automated computer
programs out there that spend their lives(?) subscribing to fora such as this
for the purposes of advertising/promoting porn, scams, harvesting email
addresses etc. Hence, we have a little test to distinguish between humans
and computers!
Simply send a blank email to the list to which you are subscribed by
selecting the appropriate link below. Two things to note (1) The email
must originate from the email address under which you are subscribed and (2)
the email must have some text in the 'subject' line - this last
requirement is due to a bug in the list administration software provided our
web-hosting provider. Note that you will receive an email with the
subject line "Confirm Unsubscribe from xxx@iwai.ie" - You MUST
REPLY to this email to complete the unsubscribe process.
To unsubscribe from Waterways Mailing List, click
here.
To unsubscribe from Mailing List Digest, click
here.
To unsubscribe from the News Updates mailing list, click
here.
Guidelines for posting to the Waterways
Mailing List
The Waterways mailing-list is a forum where everything and anything of
waterways interest is up for debate. Please contribute your knowledge and
or post your observations or queries. There are no daft questions
(really!).
Email and a web-based forum are no different from other forms of
communication, save that your words are likely to be read by a lot more
people. Those readers include the subscribers to the list, many of whom
you won't know, anyone to whom a subscriber may choose to forward some
item of information and any visitor to our
forum or
archive. The laws of libel and
defamation apply here just as much as to other forms of communication, so
please avoid all defamatory remarks.
Additionally, please conduct all dialogues in a courteous manner - there
are many users of our waterways with many differing perspectives on life
and waterways issues. Haranguing others and tit-for-tat sniping is
discouraged.
Please send emails in plain text, not HTML. Do NOT try to send attachments
(e.g. images) - you are clogging up ~400 people's email boxes.
Note that when replying to an email posted by 'Joe Bloggs', the reply
will go to the mail list, not just the poster. Be very careful. On
more than one occasion, an email has been sent in error to the list
instead of its intended recipient.
Please also consider whether it would be more appropriate to send your
email to someone personally rather than the mailing list as a whole,
before sending!
Go back to the subscribe process
Terms And Conditions
By subscribing to one of our mailing lists or forums (henceforth
forum), you agree to the following Terms And Conditions.
The purpose of this list is to provide a forum for the discussion of
matters generally relating to inland waterways and in particular (though
not exclusively), the inland waterways of Ireland.
You agree that:
- You will not use the list to propagate any material that might be
considered vulgar, illegal, fraudulent, defamatory, threatening or
abusive.
- You will conduct email exchanges in a civil and courteous manner.
- You will not use the list for any commercial purposes with the
exception of an occasional short announcement of the availability of a
significant new product or service or as a direct response to a query
from another subscriber.
- You will not use the list to send "Spam" or "Junk Mail" to other
subscribers.
- You will not send (or allow your computer to send) viruses or other
harmful messages to the list.
- You may not sell or otherwise commercially exploit any of the
information propagated by the list. (Save where that information is
clearly identified as being already in the public domain).
- You will identify yourself as the source of any submissions you make
and not attempt to hide your identity or to impersonate another.
- IWAI is not responsible for the accuracy of information submitted to
this list. Information submitted to this list is the opinion of the
subscribers themselves and may not represent the official position of
the association. Technical information may or may not be accurate.
Furthermore:
- This list is provided as a service and a resource to its subscribers
by IWAI and the association makes no guarantees as to the availability,
reliability or continued operation of the service.
- Breach of any of the above rules will result in you being removed
from the list.
- Interpretation of these rules is at the discretion of the list
moderator(s) and the list moderator's decision is final.
- Censorship: Please note that since the contents of emails and
posts will be indexed by search engines (although we could also exclude
them…), we may take a more proactive role in monitoring the content of
posts. i.e. we may decide that potentially defamatory, rude, incivil,
untrue, unkind etc.remarks have been made or indeed that a discussion is
descending into some morass of incivility and we may as a result delete
“offending” posts or threads. We ask for your forbearance if we appear
to be too trigger-happy or heavy handed. We have the best interests of
the IWAI in mind (even if our actions as moderators appear to you to be
wrong!).
Note also that our non-censoring of a particular post does not infer any
agreement or endorsement of the opinions expressed.
Go back to the subscribe process
Limitations in Interoperability between Forum
and Email
Limitations for posts made via email
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email attachments (documents or images) will NOT
appear on the web-based forum.
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there may be modifications to the formatting of
emails.
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any email addresses that appear in the email will be
obfuscated before being posted to the web-based forum.
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emails can take up to 10 minutes to appear on the
web-based forum.
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With email, we tend to include the email to which we
are replying. With a web-based forum, we tend to only make the point
we wish to make without including the earlier post (since it typically is
visible on the same web-page). We therefore try to strip off the
earlier email from a reply. Essentially, if we see a succession of
five dashes "-----", then we cut the incoming email form that point
onwards before posting it to the web-based forum.
Limitations for posts made via the web-based forum
and sent to email subscribers.
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attachments (documents or images) including embedded
images will NOT be forwarded to the email subscribers. Note however,
that each email will contain a URL, allowing the email reader to click on
the URL to read the post and its attachments.
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Formatting (bold, italics, smileys etc.) will be
stripped from posts before being forwarded to email subscribers.
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there may be modifications to the formatting of
emails.
Go back to the subscribe process.
Additional Guidelines for Email users
Do I need to change the way I use email? Well, a little more
discipline will help the forum look more attractive! So we’ve a few simple
“rules”.
- If you want to start a new discussion
(or thread), chose a sensible description for the
“subject line”;
- When you reply to a post, please
don’t modify the subject line.
- You can continue to include the
earlier email in your reply. If you do, we’ve introduced some pretty
crude rules to chop redundant material from incoming emails (to the
forum). Essentially, we chop off anything that follows:
- 5 dashes “-----“
- 5 underlines “_____”
- and a few more.
- A result of rule 3 above is that
there’s no point in putting a comment at the end of an earlier email.
- For those of you with fancy
signatures, please put a few dashes (5) at the end of your email –
that way, we chop off the signature before posting to the forum –
alternatively leave it there.
- Generally, you will want to keep your
email address away form any forum. All instances of the symbol ‘@’ are
replaced by ‘[AG]’ when emails are posted, so the text “contact Joe at
joe@bloggs.com” will appear as “contact Joe at joe[AG]bloggs.com”.
Go
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