Of checksums, no ack, and black holes

[Roy Tennant]

Have you ever submitted a message to Web4Lib and never seen it again? 
There are a couple possible reasons for this, both of which are in 
your control. But before panicking at not seeing your message come 
across, please first check the Web4Lib Archive at 
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/archive.html to make sure it was 
not posted to the list. Please also allow a decent interval of time 
(more than a few minutes, less than a week) for it to appear. If your 
message still has not appeared after the aforementioned decent 
interval, here are a couple reasons why you may not have seen your 
message and what to do about them:

Reason one: You are set to "no ack", which means your message is not 
sent back to you by the listserver software. It is, however, sent to 
everyone else. I believe "ack" is the default, so unless you have 
reset your settings, you should see it come back to you as a list 
posting. If you believe you are set to "no ack", you can reset this 
by sending the message "set web4lib mail ack" to 
listserv at webjunction.org

Reason two: The listserver software doesn't like you. Just kidding! 
In order to try to prevent bounced messages from being endlessly 
redistributed to the list, one of the things ListProc does is to 
perform a "checksum" check on each submitted message. This means the 
software computes a sum from an algorithm that takes the message 
content as input, then checks that sum against the sums of the last 
500 messages. If they match, then your message is not sent through. 
To get your message past this check, add or remove a word and 
resubmit it. If you didn't keep a copy, let me know at 
roy.tennant at ucop.edu and I will retrieve it for you. Thanks,
Roy Tennant
Web4Lib Owner