Sam - MacAmbulance wrote on 31/7/09 at 16:43 >I'm off for two weeks too, Cuba for me! I'm away Monday 3rd to 18th and >will be delisting so you don't get an autoreply ;)
oh blimey...I hope we don't get one of those in a loop. Let me take this opportunity to explain the worst-case scenario in the absence of a moderator to everybody. Say for example that Sam forgot to set the auto reply not to go to the list. Someone (let's call them "Fred") posts an innocuous message. Sam auto replies. Some then receives the auto reply via the list. He auto replies to it. At this point, there is one loop, spawning an endless series of auto replies. This is bad. It's nothing compared to what comes next. Someone else (let's call them Arnold), gets this flood of auto replies: let's imagine that operating on a 10 minute loop (one message every 10 minutes). he posts to the list "hey, what's going on". Sam auto replies to Arnold. We now have two loops. That's my message every five minutes. Another poster tries to be helpful (let's call her "Betty") and says to the list "I understand what is happening. Please do not post any messages to the list or make it worse". Sam auto replies... we're now down to every 2 1/2 minutes for each message. Someone else posts a question to Betty via the list asking for more details. 1 1/4 minutes per message. Throw in a few angry complaints and you end up with a loop that is running so fast you can't imagine it. The worst-case scenario that I have actually seen in real life was in the early days of MacOS 10 when there was an applications list. We had well over 700 auto replies in less than an hour before the list moderator got out of bed that day. Imagine if he had had the day off. It virtually destroyed the list -- for weeks afterwards people were writing insanely angry rants to the list, as if everybody had done it to them on purpose. So -- if you see an auto reply on the list, firstly hope that it is configured intelligently (to send only one message) -- this is actually usually the case nowadays). DO not reply! If you see two from the same person, I suggest you go to the Google page for the group and set your preferences to no mail as soon as you can -- if there are two via the list, that means they will keep on coming. Don't mistake this for getting one to your personal address directly -- some auto replies will do that. I will return to the chaos in a fortnight and fix it. You will then have to remember to return (turn your mail on again). If you can possibly avoid it, please do not leave the list -- it makes an awful lot of work for me to resubscribe everybody who drifts back. However, if you can't get the no mail settings to work, so be it... But I have not seen this for years -- and I suspect that Google works out what's going on automatically and stops it. Good luck! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sussex Mac User Group" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/smug?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
