Moderator's Note: Please READ

[Bob Greene]

Well, a couple of things for today, and then the normal deluge begins :).

First, thanks for the vote of approval! Overwhelmingly, people who
responded to my query "Should we unmoderate Sunspots/comp.sys.sun?" felt
that moderation was a good thing, and should be preserved if at all
possible. I had about 150 responses, and about 95% felt that moderation
was needed, even if it promised the bad response times I had mentioned :).
So, for the moment, c.s.s. will remain moderated... 

Second, as a result of the last poll, I have the feeling that it's time
for a restructuring of the groups system (I know - you guys with automated
tools that work on the Topic line are going to hate me). The current
system has the following Topics:

  1. 386i - usually not used. I've been using it lately 'cause I need
     to set up a neat way of forwarding thing to the sun-386i list. This
     is probably only a temporary topic.
  2. Hardware - discussions which relate to Sun hardware or hardware that
     you can use on a Sun. I've been known to put things like disk 
     geometry requests and printer printcap requests in here too.
  3. Networks - discussions which relate to any type of Networking issues
     on Suns. I've included discussions of how to set up Sun networks
     side by side with how to run protocol 'x' on a Sun. Also, I sometimes
     put information relating to software which deals with network(ing)
     here.
  4. Software - discussions of any non-public domain software.
  5. Source - discussions of any public domain software. The actual sources
     are no longer sent to the list, but are archived on titan.rice.edu.
  6. SunOS - discussions about bugs/features of SunOS.
  7. Windows - discussions of Sunview/OpenWindows/X (and even sometimes
     generic graphics questions).
  8. Miscellaneous - anything that didn't fit in one of the above topics.

Now, the important thing to note is that Miscellaneous is a *very* active
topic. Misc probably sends out about 3 times as much volume wise as any
other group (except Hardware). This tends to make me thing that the
categories are probably insufficient. I've been trying to sort out a good
set of new topics for a while, and haven't had a lot of luck. I'd
appreciate reader input, even if it's just to say "The topics are fine
now, please don't change them."

And finally, a big announcement for me. I'd like to personally welcome
Cathy Foulston to the Sunspots "staff". Cathy, a SysAdmin/Networking Guru
at Rice University, will be doing all the "yucky" work of maintaining the
Internet/Bitnet direct mailing lists for the digests. As a co-moderator,
she'll have a general idea of how things work and the submission policies,
but she won't actually be doing any of the actual moderation, so the
process for reaching the moderator directly becomes more complex [:)]. For
all non-time-sensitive matters, the address 'sun-spots-request at rice.edu'
is still the preferred avenue to reach a moderator. In case of an
emergency relating to the Bitnet/Internet direct mailing list, Cathy can
be reached as 'cathyf at rice.edu'.

In any event, I think this will be a big win for everyone, 'cause as a
bunch of you can testify, my response time to add/drop requests made the 2
week lags for posting look short [:(].

Oh, one more thing: please note my new address: 'rgreene at bnr.ca'. This
address should now be used if you need to get in touch with me urgently.

Bob Greene                             rgreene at bnr.ca
LAN/WAN Engineering and Support        ESN 446-7396
Bell Northern Research                 (214) 907-7396
Richardson Texas USA                   Sunspots to: sun-spots at rice.edu