sci.med.midwifery Posting Guidelines

Copyright 2002-2005, Brian Edmonds
$Revision: 1.6 $ $Date: 2005/01/16 00:01:40 $

The latest version of this document can be found at

• http://www.robomod.net/sci.med.midwifery/
• post to the newsgroup or mailing list with the following text in the subject (without the quotes): "send file: guidelines.txt"

Any inquiries, comments or suggestions should be sent to the group moderator at sci-med-midwifery-moderator@robomod.net.

Contents

• Introduction
• Charter
  • Miscellaneous Policies
  • Robomoderation
• How To Submit a Post
• The Mailing List

Introduction

The sci.med.midwifery newsgroup was created in September 1995. The group originally had a panel of moderators who oversaw all postings. Over time these moderators burned out or moved on to other things, and the final blow was struck when the technical moderator disappeared, causing the group to fall idle.

In April 2002 the previous lead moderator, Ibrahim Hublou, passed control of the group to Brian Edmonds, who is running the group and a companion, gated mailing list under full robomoderation.

Since its creation a number of control messages have been sent which at some sites appear to have erroneously changed the status of the group to unmoderated. If this is the case at your site, you should bring it to the attention of your news admin, as any postings you make to a moderated group which is not properly recognized as such at your site will be silently discarded at any site where the group is correctly carried as moderated.

Charter

sci.med.midwifery will be a moderated discussion group on all aspects of the practice of obstetrics by midwives. This can include, but is not limited to case consultation, distribution of new information in the specialty, discussion of the practice environment and conditions and on the education and training in diversity of midwives.

The intended participants of this proposed group would be midwives. All others without commercial aims involved in gentle midwifery including and not limited to: Birthchild Educators, Labor Supporters, Childbirth Assistants, Herbalists, Breastfeeding Consultances, Doulas, and other people with relevant knowledge, skills, questions and remarks are greatfully welcomed to join.

Miscellaneous Policies

The moderation software may (now or possibly in the future) enforce the following policies:

• Postings must be in plain text. In particular no HTML or mixed text and HTML posts will be allowed. Excessive quoting and large sigs are also not allowed. Any post with more than 70% quoted material or a sig in excess of 512 bytes will be rejected.
• Postings must be formatted within 80 characters in width (limiting your lines to 72 characters is recommended), and also must not exhibit the long/short/long/short/etc misformatting that some posting agents can produce when misconfigured.
• No binary postings of any sort will be accepted. Exceptions will be made for cryptographic signatures and such. S/MIME signatures are usually far too bulky and will probably not be accepted.
• Crossposting is not allowed except through manual intervention by the moderator. Contact the moderator if you feel you need to crosspost to sci.med.midwifery and any other group.
• Followups can be to no more than one group, or to poster.
• Mail address blacklisting and whitelisting may be implemented as deemed necessary. In addition a number of anti-spam filters are in place, and will be expanded as needed.

All posts (with a working return address) will either be returned with a rejection notice, or posted to the newsgroup and mailing list. One exception is that rejection notices for the same error are suppressed for a few minutes after the first one is sent to reduce the danger of the robomoderator being used as a mailbombing agent.

Posting with a non-replyable address is strongly discouraged. If you feel you must post with such an address, please make sure you are not using one in a valid mail domain; appending .invalid to the address is the recommended way to ensure this.

Robomoderation

The robomoderation software (robomod) enforces various anti-spam and text formatting requirements. Note that in order to receive rejection notices or other information from robomod it must have a valid email address for you. More information on the registration process, including how to use munged addreses, can be found at

• http://www.robomod.net/register.html
• post to the newsgroup or mailing list with the following text in the subject (without the quotes): "send file: register.txt"

Submissions from non-registered addresses will be held for human moderation. The moderators may at their discretion register addresses for auto-approval, or revert them to hand moderated status.

How To Submit a Post

At a correctly configured site you should simply be able to post to sci.med.midwifery and everything will be managed for you behind the scenes. If you find this does not work for you, you can submit directly to the submission agent by mailing your posting to sci-med-midwifery@robomod.net.

Please try the newsgroup first, and be sure to bring any problems to the attention of your local news administrator so that they can be dealt with.

The Mailing List

All postings to sci.med.midwifery are also distributed to the mailing list sci-med-midwifery@robomod.net, which is available in both regular and digest format. For subscription information, send email to sci-med-midwifery-request@robomod.net or visit the list webpage at http://www.robomod.net/mailman/listinfo/sci-med-midwifery.

Likewise, all postings to the mailing list are also distributed to the newsgroup, so subscribers can use whichever of the newsgroup, list, or digest formats is most comfortable.