| Class Listserv Gatekeepers (moderators)
You Are
Here: Home> Class Info
YAHOO-GROUPS DETAIL
THE
GATEKEEPERS ROLE
Yahoo gives us the option of
creating electronic mailing lists that are open to the public or
private. Because of privacy
concerns we decided to make all lists of the Alumni & Friends of
Yorktown High School, Inc.
private.
One of the key tasks of the list
Moderator is to determine who will be on your class list. We get
interest from people from other
classes, and schools that are interested in joining friends on
the class lists. So far we've
handled this by telling everyone that the lists are limited to
classmates, but if there are
one or more individuals who the "outsider" wants to communicate
with, we forward contact
information to whoever it is that is the object of the interest.
If that individual wants to get in touch
with the requesting individual,
that's entirely up to them.
HOW TO ADD
CLASSMATES TO YOUR CLASS LIST
Because of your
having agreed to me a moderator (or gatekeeper) you or you and
several classmates have
special rights on the mailing list including adding new members.
The first thing to do is to enter all your classmates
information in a word processing file and block
and copy the data to the appropriate
window in the "add entries" window. Then if there is a glitch
you don't have to re-enter a long
list of email entries.
To do it you'll need
to go to the website associated with each class list, log on
with your personal password
(or register if it's your first yahoo account) and then go to
the members section and select the first tab on the next page - add.
The system lists individuals in
alphabetical order of their email for some reason.
The format for adding people is
pretty inflexible, but is as follows:
emailaddress@whatever.com[space]MAIDENNAME[underscore]Lastname[space]Firstname.
If you don't use the underscore
or include a comma the system behaves erratically. Then you are
asked if you want to invite the new entry or add them without
giving the person a chance to decide for themselves. This
option, while discouraged, isn't really as bad as it seems
because at the bottom of each email
from the list there are instructions on how to be taken off the
list.
Finally you need to post the
information entered to the list. If you don't or hit escape by
accident, all the names and
additional text you submitted is deleted and needs to be
re-entered. When the system returns you to the list's
members the new entries should be reflected. Sometimes
the email is listed, but not the
name, and you can't fix the omission by trying to edit the
entry. I think what is
happening is that Yahoo apparently keeps information about each
of it's subscribers in a
place unrelated to what it is your trying to do on their system,
and links the necessary information to whatever it is your doing. In this instance, they link
your email eddress and name to the members list
of your class mailing list. But if
an individual hasn't identified themselves to yahoo their system
is blank and doesn't present
the necessary information.
That's why new users need to
create a yahoo identity. One word of caution, again this
isn'tconfirmed, we've heard that Yahoo [which is a free service]
uses some of the information you list voluntarily. We're not sure if this is true or just how
the information might be used, but we suggestyou caution people
to provide Yahoo with only the information they require.
We've been adding some language
to the welcome message that encourages classmates to tell all
their YHS friends about the last
mailing lists and to contact us at:
members@yorktownalums.org
something like:
HOW TO RESPOND TO REQUEST
TO JOIN YOUR CLASS LIST
When someone that is not on the
lists wants to be added they can send an email to the list, and
you as moderator receive a
message that someone wants to join. But the letter from
Yahoogroups alerting you to
the request to join provides you with a link that you can click
to execute the addition.
Normally that's would be fine,
but to make sure only classmates are on the list, it's necessary
for us to verify who the
requesting party is and all you get on the acceptance/rejection
screen is the requesting
party's email eddress. So you need to send a NEW MESSAGE to the
email eddress of the
requesting person, and find out whether they were a classmate at
some point during your
Yorktown years. If they attended Yorktown and were in your
class, go pack to the Yahoo
Acceptance/Rejection page and accept them, otherwise explain to
them in an email that the lists are restricted to former Yorktown students from your class,
and then go to the Yahoo
Acceptance/Rejection page and reject their request.
Revised 5/27/2001,/center> |